After I Buy Cyalume SnapLight Industrial Grade Light Sticks, Green, 6" Long, 12 Hour Duration (Pack of 10)I bought sets of several colors of these Cyalume SnapLight Industrial Grade Chemical Light Sticks, for emergency preparedness and the first night of having them, I opened up each color and activated each one.
Quickly, I'll just say that these seem to be pretty standard, if rugged, light sticks. They're a bit thicker than what I've typically seen kids playing with at 4th of July fireworks shows and the like, but basically they are what they are. Light sticks, with perhaps an industrial use slant. This is the first time I've bought light sticks, so I can't really speak to price.
Anyway, what you probably care most about, here, is the brightness. On first snapping of the stick, they will certainly light up a small room, well enough to see clearly. After an hour, however, you'll probably be stumbling around in the dark unless you're holding it in front of you, these are quite dimmer than a candle flame. As time goes on, the light will get dimmer and dimmer. Put a few down on sharp corners, and you'll avoid smacking into anything in the dark and hurting yourself, but after a few hours you're basically just using these as signal flares, rather than a source of good working illumination. There will certainly be a glow inside the stick for many hours, perhaps even 12 as advertised, but the nature of the chemistry is such that the strongest brightness will be at the beginning, and it will taper off from there. As you approach the 12 hour mark you can probably read a book with it, if you hold it right up against the page, but that's probably about it.
So, which color is brightest? They're all about the same, I would say, at least of the ones advertised at 12 hours. But, bear in mind, the human eye is tuned more to see shades of color closer to the green part of the spectrum. That's just how we evolved with our green-tinted world. Night vision goggles use green phosphors so users can see better, and lights backstage at a theater are red so they don't spill out onto the stage and disturb the audience. While any color of light stick you might buy is probably about the same brightness, your eyes will see much better if you get the green light stick. Yellow is quite good too. Orange seems a bit dimmer. Red is the hardest to see with. That's not to say red light sticks aren't just as visible at a distance, but they will be harder to use as sources of light to brighten your surroundings. That's just the way our eyes work.
So, just buy green? I don't know if that's my advice. Hiking at night, I think attaching (with the convenient hooks) red light sticks to each member of a group would help keep people from getting lost, without ruining anyone's night vision. Orange might be good to mark the trail to the outhouse with. Green or yellow might be best to read with in your tent. The different colors might also be used to indicate different things. The nice thing about these light sticks is they come in all sorts of colors, so you can figure out how best to use them, yourself.
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