Lighting Tech: Spot vs. Flood vs. Combo Beam Patterns
Ever look at a light description and see that it’s defined as a spot-beam pattern? Have you ever picked up one of those huge off-road lights and seen it described as a flood-beam pattern? How about those LED light bars and their “combo beam” pattern? What does all of that mean and how do you know what you’re getting? In this article, we’ll take a brief look into those beams and how they can be utilized.
First, light patterns are defined by length and width of the beam of light that each type of light produces. The lights we’ll be talking about in this article will all pertain to auxiliary lights and not your fog, high-, or low-beam headlights. These lights allow you to scan far into the distance or wide across the horizon, again, depending on the type of beam produced.
A spotlight beam is a very narrow beam of light that allows you to scan well into the distance. They are very powerful, but at close range the amount of light that is spread is not very large. They do not work well as a replacement for headlights as I have seen some drivers try to do on their custom rigs. They are used to see well down the trail on a focused point.
A flood-beam, on the other hand, is a very wide beam of light. It’s not for flood conditions, but instead floods the horizon with light. It doesn’t produce a long beam of light, so far distances will not be easily seen by a flood-beam. However your side-to-side view will be increased during low-light and nighttime conditions. You’d use this to see the trail ahead with a wider horizon and increasing your field of view.
Finally, a new form of light beam has come on the market thanks to the LED light bar: the combo-beam. The beam of light that is produced by a combo-beam will be just a little narrower than the flood beam and just a little shallower than the spotlight beam. Despite that, it does provide a wider and longer beam in a smaller package versus using two separate lights together which allows for an increased field of view.