MikeSalt said:
I have a P1D-CE, and cannot fault it at all, love it to bits. So it may come as a surprise that I would suggest a Cree powered SureFire. The difference is that you do not seem to worry about how much it costs, and I use the motto, "Buy the best you can afford".
The reason I chose the Fenix is that it fits sensibly on a keychain. It amuses me greatly that my most powerful torch is also my keyring torch. Beamshot comparisons against my monstrously huge MagLite 6D and the Fenix never cease to make me chuckle.
There's a difference between "the best you can afford" and "the brightest you can afford". Surefire has a serious track record of making very solid, durable lights for harsh use by military and LE operators. The Fenix stuff isn't bad but it's basically consumer electronics and built accordingly. For the price of a Fenix you could get a Surefire G2 or (maybe) E2e which are less sexy and high tech but are quite possibly less likely to fail under rough conditions. So there's some room for interpretation as to what is "best". What you
really want is a light with Surefire's ruggedness but with modern components (Cree led etc).
The Surefire light comparable to the P1D (Luxeon based) is the E1L (aka E1e/KL1). They don't have a P1D-CE equivalent yet but I hope they make one soon. The thing is, the E1L, while still pocket sized, is much larger than a P1D. Whether that's inevitable, I don't know. I guess I can live with it. I'm not into 123-powered lights any more, but if Surefire made an 1AA or 2AA Cree light I'd probably buy it even if it was bigger and more expensive than the corresponding Fenix.
Here is a thread about the internals of the Fenix E0, a low-cost Fenix light that turns out to not be very solidly constructed (this is the basis of the "consumer electronics" comment above). Until someone takes a P1D-CE or L1D-CE apart and finds it's put together differently, I think we have to assume that the higher end Fenixes are built around the same way as the E0, and as such we can't think of them as rough-duty lights.