I'll just throw in my 2 cents. These lights were inevitably going to come out, everybody knew it and it was just a question of particulars. What we have seen so far looks promising. I will probably be caving and buying one or both of these lights. That said, there are a couple things I'd like to get off my chest.
First off, I've said it before, others have said it before, and I'll say it again: Low needs to be LOW!!
It's lovely that we've now got these whiz-bang emitters that can push 2 lumens for a year straight on a AAA, yet no one seems to be doing this. Rather, they just slap an existing current structure into a Cree based light, and vua la... "low" is now 10 lumens or higher. People- the technology has changed but our eyes have not! Remember that 10 lumens was HDS's "primary" medium mode and it worked just fine. For an EDC light, I need a real low (between 1 and 5 lumens max) so that I don't burn my eyeballs off when I'm on a darkened airplane and need to look in my bag for a piece of gum or read a book. Its great that we can have some decent runtimes on the eye-searing spot-the-owl-in-the-distant-tree settings, but give us a real low for pete's sake.
OK rant over. Now a word about prices. No prices for these lights have been released yet, so I'm willing to give Fenix the benefit of the doubt. However, we did see a $20 premium for the Cree emitter in the first Fenix Cree based offering (which sold like hotcakes), so I'm concerned Fenix will keep with the set precedent and continue seeing dollar signs. Now, I understand that this is a buisness, and whatever the market will bear, etc, but IMHO, a $20 premium is unreasonable considering Fenix's history of providing good quality at reasonable prices. The Cree LED is the current state of the art, and it is just a matter of (very little) time before a Cree Dorcy appears in Target for $20. These emitters are pretty much the same price as luxeons, so you can't keep charging for "newness." When Photons switched from the old 5mm LED to the twice as bright CS, they didn't raise the price. JetBeam has come up with a 1AA Cree for under $30!! Fenix will need to price these lights under $50 for me to feel that I'm getting a decent value.
These criticism's aside, I do respect Fenix's tireless innovation and their generally excellent products and I never hesitate to recommend their lights (and 4seven's superb web buisness of course) to any newly interested people I come across.
And small size..
I just got a L1T for Christmas and cannot afford to get another light.
