The glory days of the incandescent flashlight are gone. The technology has peaked in terms of performance with LED filling in most of the market.
CPF members often fail to appreciate that the general market just needs a flashlight for occasional utility lighting and emergencies, thus will go with whatever's on store shelves and offers whatever minimal combination of performance and features on the package they're willing to pay for. Looking at the packaging for consumer- and construction-grade flashlights, it would seem that consumers greatly value not having to replace bulbs, brightness, are interested in drop/dunk-resistance, and pay some attention to runtime. Above all, $10 seems to be a common bar for a junk drawer flashlight and $20 is the general limit for a jobsite type flashlight.
Sure, bulbs are cheap, readily replaceable, and the single most common failure element in an incandescent flashlight ... but it annoyed consumers to have to replace them. They did seem to fail quite often at inopportune times: the junk drawer scenario of pulling an almost never-used flashlight with nearly dead cells (probably cheap "Heavy Duty" cells at that) only to have the bulb flash as it draws more current than usual might be well-understood by most of us, but was thoroughly detested by consumers.
I imagine the common bulbs will be available for some time. The PR bases and anything mag-lite makes will be safe as will bulbs for SF or Streamlight models that cost decent money and/or were used across multiple models.
I should source some G2's and a few P60 bulbs...
Flashlight manufacturers love LEDs. Incan bulbs are fragile and burn out on a regular basis, meaning the manufacturers have to pack thousands of tiny little replacement lightbulbs in (relatively) very expensive individual blister packs. LEDs are nearly indestructible and will last about as long as the user cares to use them, and the heatsinking requirement means they're not easily replaceable anyway, so the manufacturer only has to have one product line -- complete pre-assembled lights. That reduces overhead costs dramatically.
Flashlight manufacturers do not sell bulbs as a public service - they wouldn't be producing them if they didn't make something on them (or at least somehow contribute to staying afloat). Much like how light bulb manufacturers raked in profit manufacturing Edison-socket incandescent light bulbs for home use at $0.50/each, flashlight manufacturers made even
more profit making far smaller DC bulbs with a fraction of the materials for similar (or more) prices per bulb. Their volumes were lower, but replacement bulbs were profitable for them - especially proprietary models like the mini-maglite xenon bulbs and other proprietary high-performance incans such as SF, Streamlight, etc.
There are a lot of purely financial reasons why flashlight manufacturers would want to switch to LED for all and for good.
If you want to sell new flashlights, LED's were great since they offered longer runtimes and - after we got past Lumileds holding the exclusive on "power LED's" - only marginally more expensive for
more lumens. Consumers were becoming dimly aware of the fact that LED's ran for a long time and lasted (in flashlight terms) forever. Thus, Inova et al started taking "premium" shelf space from Mag-Lite in places like Target as they offered innovative
(to consumers anyway) new designs.
