ThruNite Archer 2A V3 Flashlight: A Better Option Than Your Phone
Just slightly larger than a standard Sharpie marker, the ThruNite Archer 2A V3 fits comfortably in my hand and has four brightness levels: high, medium, low, and a soft, yellowish glow called firefly. It also has an emergency strobe light.
I like having options. I don’t need a searing beacon to find my way to the kitchen during a power outage — low works just fine. The gentle firefly mode is great for not distracting a driver when I’ve dropped something on a car floor at night. I’m not a parent, but I’m told that the firefly setting is also excellent for checking on sleeping kids.
If I do need to flood a blackened space with light, like the time one of my cats got into our cavernous crawlspace, the brightest setting, a 500-lumen beam is ideal: It easily found a pair of guilty eyes in a far corner and identified the rescue path with the least amount of spiderwebs.
In fact, I’m constantly finding new uses for this flashlight, such as for reading an awkwardly placed serial number on a dishwasher without having to slide the machine out from under the counter. Shadows deep inside my closet have parted to reveal a pair of rarely worn and much-needed dress shoes minutes before I had to leave for a wedding. And the morning I wrote my draft of this article, I had spilled a few drops of coffee on my dimly lit stairs. A swift pass with the Archer 2A V3 illuminated the few brown splotches on brown wood that needed cleaning, saving me from pulling out a mop and pointlessly going over every step.
It’s also handy for locating tiny objects — about a week after my revelation on the stairs, I stuck my wedding and engagement rings in my pocket while cleaning, and when I pulled them back out, the engagement ring (which is not much thicker than the wire inside a bread-tie) went flying. After a visual scan failed to turn it up, the Archer 2A V3 quickly found it on the edge of a patterned rug next to the leg of a chaise.
