Should auto-darkening lenses 'blink' when looking at the sun?
My new lens does it and the seller says that it is normal.
It goes dark and then randomly darkens and undarkens at a seemingly constant light source.
What say you?
I am going to say that it is normal. I find that it isn't real easy to get it to darken from the sun if I want it to such as if I were going to demonstrate the darkening effect by using the sun as a source and from this I think the sensor is somewhat directional.
Although the sun source may be constant I read somewhere that the autodarkening mechanism is very sensitive to changes in light so it will trigger the darkening quickly. What I'm getting at is while the sun is constant a slight change in increasing light intensity will trigger the darkening mode but if the helmet isn't aligned well with the source it will undarken because of the directionality. The helmet may work more consistently with welding due to larger amounts of other wavelengths of light including infra-red being given off at close range. I am always surprised at the sensitivity mine has at what seems to be rather low levels of light from sparks generated by my sanding disk.
May be a lot of crappola but it is the way I see it right now.
billh
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