The Fenix P1DCE is a legendary flashlight, pretty much anyone here who cares about single 123-cell powered lights has at least one (I have two). It's a good place to start if you'd like to get into high-output LED pocket/"EDC" lights.
Here is a review I wrote about the P1DCE way back in April of last year:
For the past couple of decades, the only real name in pocket flashlights was Maglite's MiniMag. Used by police and professionals alike, even honored with design awards, the MiniMag pretty much ran the show since it's introduction in 1984. Sure, the light output was just decent, and the "beam focus" feature was a gimmick no one really used, but for a well-engineered flashlight, it couldn't be beat. Until now.
It's the classic David vs Goliath tale - the Fenix P1D-CE is small even on a small flashlight scale, keyring small, silly small; picture a cylinder roughly half the height of an aluminum soda can with the diameter of a nickel: that's the kind of small we're talking about here. It doesn't even look real; the size combined with the perfectly smooth and exquisitely faceted exterior gives the impression that this is perhaps a 1/2 scale mock up of an actual flashlight.
The disbelief continues as you remove the Fenix from it's slightly-larger-than-a-cigarette-pack box. The P1D-CE without a battery weighs in at 27 grams, or the weight of 27 paper clips. More precisely, that's less mass than an iPod Nano. That's *less than one ounce*. But the feel is without question the cold and unyielding touch of heavy-gauge Type III aluminum, and the lens is not just actual glass, but perfectly flat and coated optics-grade glass. The size might not be serious, but the engineering certainly is.
Yet all the dimensional absurdity is just the prelude to the light itself - this is where the real ridiculousness begins: The light is phosphor-white (similar to an HID car headlight in color), but plainly speaking, there is more of it than is physically possible from an object this size. It would make more sense if someone were standing behind you with a spotlight, or perhaps if the Fenix were nuclear-powered. The P1D-CE produces *more than twice the total light output of a 4 D cell full-size MagLite*. Point the Fenix at the ceiling of an unlit room and the area is lit with more ambient light than a 15 watt light bulb. License plates and street signs hundreds of feet away blaze to life in the night. Shine it in your eyes and you're legally blind for the next twenty seconds. That is of course, unless you turn it down...
As if the Fenix engineers weren't content with an alien-technology light source, the P1D-CE also includes "modes" which give you a range of lighting options. You probably don't always want to walk around with the flashlight blazing full-tilt, so there are low, medium, and high settings. Twisting the head of the flashlight turns it on, and twisting it off and on again moves it into the next mode. There's also "strobe" mode, which flicks the light on and off quickly for a stroboscopic effect, and SOS, allowing you to send an emergency signal automatically without further touching the flashlight at all.
And all of this is powered by - (drum roll) - one battery. No fumbling with giant family packs of box store batteries just to get some light, a single 123A lithium battery (sold overpriced at your local store in the "photo batteries" section, find them online at less than $2 each) powers everything. Battery life varies wildly between the modes - low mode will net you over 10 hours, while high can suck the cell dry in less than an hour. But the key here is "intelligent" circuitry; Unlike flashlights of old, where you could determine battery life by how bright the light was, Fenix employs a power regulator circuit - no more slowly fading light over time, leaving you to wonder if the flashlight is really as bright as it could be; the P1D-CE is just as bright as when the batteries were first installed for nearly all of the total runtime. That means that on the low setting, the ninth hour and beyond is just as bright as the first few minutes. And since it's a lithium battery, months of shelf time doesn't make a difference.
So what is Fenix's secret? It all comes down to LED technology, and the Durham, North Carolina-made Cree LED in the P1D-CE is a fine example. Just as you can buy an LED light bulb for your house which uses less than a tenth of the energy of an incandescent bulb, the same concept works just as well with flashlights, and people are starting to notice - these super-small, super-efficient LED flashlights are all the rage nowadays; Police departments are actually doing away with the old full-size Maglite and replacing them with newer and better mini LED lights, of which the P1D-CE is by a large margin the brightest and most versatile. You're only $70 away from dumping your vintage incandescent antique and joining them. Five tiny but beaming stars for Fenix's remarkable introduction to 21st century lighting technology.
(Addendum: What about the new LED MiniMag? Maglite's new LED series of MiniMags have less than half the light output of the Fenix, and their "energy management" circuit doesn't quite live up to it's name, so the light gradually dims over time like most other flashlights. LED MiniMags are also larger and heavier than the incandescent originals, still use a plastic lens prone to scuffing, and still use Type II aluminum that collects nicks and scratches over time. Powered by regular AA cells [and with no brightness options], battery life is at most four hours until completely dead, plus there's no polarity protection; should you accidentally place the batteries in backwards, the light will be destroyed. The LED MiniMag is a definite improvement over the original, but not quite on par with the Fenix.)
