Remember that keychain flashlight that brought a massively bright 360 lumens in an ultra-tiny package? That was awesome. Problem is, 360 lumens just isn’t enough for more serious tasks, like when you’re exploring hidden dungeons or searching for lost kingdoms in the jungle. For those times, you need something with way more power. If you want something much brighter, but still small enough to stash in your pants pocket, maybe the Nitecore T4K will do the trick.
Billed as “the world’s smallest 4,000-lumen flashlight,” the lighting tool measures just 3.2 x 1.18 x 1.15 inches (length x width x thickness), allowing it to fit in most any pants pocket with room to spare for other stuff. Seriously, if you want to bring maximum lighting without the awkward size, just throw this in your EDC stash and you’re set.
The Nitecore T4K is actually billed as a keychain light, although the frame probably makes it more of a nuisance to have dangling when using your keys, so we’d probably recommend keeping it on its own. And yes, it’s legitimately putting out a maximum brightness of 4,000 lumens, courtesy of four CREE XP-L2 V6 LEDs. Even better, you can abruptly switch it on to the maximum brightness while turned off by simply pressing and holding the Mode button, allowing it to instantly blind anyone in front of you, making it a viable self-defense tool that can quickly distract a potential attacker and allow you to make a run for it.
It pairs those four CREE LEDs with a reflective optic system that, the outfit claims, creates a uniform light, so everything in front of you gets properly illuminated, allowing you to see things clearly. The maximum throw is an impressive 656 feet, too, so you can see a good distance far ahead.And while it may not stop a bear from attacking you while walking on the trail at night, you can, at least, see it before the attack, allowing you to recount a cool story, in case you ever end up miraculously surviving the ordeal.
The Nitecore T4K comes with a concealed cooling design that embeds the emitters on a 3mm-thick copper-cooling PCB, which, the outfit claims, can make the heat quickly dissipate for stable performance. Despite this design element, though, we have a feeling this thing will get really hot really fast if you switch it up to high brightness levels, considering how packed the electronics are inside the compact shell. The light, by the way, is powered by a 1,000mAh battery that can give it a maximum runtime of 67 hours at the low setting.
It comes with two buttons on the body, one for power and one for mode, as well as an OLED display above them, which can show the real-time brightness, battery level, operating mode, and remaining runtime. Other features include five brightness levels, a detachable pocket clip, USB-C fast charging, lockout modes (to prevent accidental switching on), a mechanical quick release design (when held on the included metal ring pull), and a hard-anodized finish.
The Nitecore T4K will come out later this year.