These Little Lights of Ours

People have some weird opinions about these lanterns we’ve sold before. We’ve heard praise that they’re brighter than people expected. Yay!

And we’ve also heard some grumbling that they’re smaller than people expected. Huh?

Let’s get this straight: they’re as bright as bigger lanterns, but they’re smaller. And that’s… bad? So they’d be better if Eveready had just taken the same lantern and put it inside a bigger lantern chassis, wasting a bunch of plastic and taking up unnecessary space inside your tent, van, or campsite?

For everyone alive today, expectations about artificial lighting were set during the incandescent era. Lightbulbs worked by heating up a coil of metal, so if you wanted more light, you were gonna need a bigger coil.

LEDs have changed all that. Miniaturization has come to flashlights and lanterns. That’s why you can have a crazy bright light in your phone with a diameter the size of a BB.

Maybe for our underwhelmed customers, “smaller” was another way of saying “not as bright as I expected”. Maybe that problem will be solved by us selling two-packs so you can cluster a bunch together for brightness. If you want a lantern so bright you can’t see the stars, maybe camping isn’t for you.

In any case, it’s a good thing that these lamps are as small as they are. And if you really need to fill some space, we’ll throw in a couple of free bags of Texas air.