Could xenon Flashlamps be used as Headlamps?

Suppose you had an array of these, so flashing in sequence, they would provide a continuous beam of light…would this work? Xenon lamps are VERY bright, and they don’t use a lot of electricity. has anyone ever tried this approach?
Incidentally, those gas-discharge super bright headlamps: there is a black market for these lamps now…sombody broke into a local LEXUS dealer and stole 15 of these lamps off cars in the lot. Maybe there are no aftermarket makers of these lamps? On a LEXUS, they retail for over $650.00 a pop!

Those HID lamps you mention are essentially the same as a xenon flash lamp, only the discharge is continous, rather than pulsed. And they do use a lot of electricity.

Well, it’s vaguely possible. For instance, [www.lot-oriel.com/pdf_uk/all/light_xe_pulsed.pdf+xenon+flashlamp&hl=en&ie=UTF-8]these](http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:HUo2pP5h7cEJ:[url) guys, if I interpret the page correctly, sell a strobe capable of 60Hz operation. That is, you get an intense pulse of light for a couple of micro seconds every 60th of a second. Persistance of vision should take care of any flicker. You probably don’t want to go much below 20 or 30 Hz, or you’ll get strobing behavior which would be more distracting than useful.

But it looks like it requires a fairly large power supply (75 Watts or so). Not impossibly large by battery standards, but nothing you’d want to wander through the woods with. By way of contrast, I think my Vivitar flash unit will do a few hundred flashes on a set of four AA batteries. But at 60/second, well, hopefully you can accomplish everything you want to do in the dark in four or five seconds. You probably also have some thermal issues. Even a single flash from a strobe can generate noticeable heat.

An important reason for this is the very short duration of the flash. As QED notes, for continuous light it’s a different story.

Indeed, cases where you get a large amount of energy out while putting a small amount in are tolerably rare.