What is so special about Surefire? I realize their quality is probably awesome, but a 400 dollar light that runs 20 minutes?????
To some degree you answered your own question.
In general, if a product's price doesn't make sense to you, and yet the product does indeed seem to sell, then perhaps you are not the intended buyer for that product.
Another point - amazingly enough there are more considerations to illumination tools than brightness and runtime, although those are certainly serious considerations. There is also quality and reliability, which you mention and then immediately discount. That's fine for you - but perhaps others rate those qualities more highly.
Maybe the special forces (or whoever buys these lights) is totally price insensitive - it's not like it's THEIR money after all - and it's worth it to them for what might seem like small improvements in reliability. Perhaps some organization has standardized on these, and even at $400 per light, it's just easier to keep buying them than to change over to other lights, or deal with the logistics of having several different lights deployed. Maybe there's some standard or specification that Surefire can assert they meet that Olight can't meet. (Maybe Olight COULD meet that spec, if only they knew about it!) That standard might be completely meaningless to you and me, but be worth $400 to the customer for this light.
Although I don't think this is the case with SF, there isn't anything wrong with having a product that has NO benefit over it's competition other than merely being an expensive and hard to obtain status item. (OK, it's possible that for many of us on this forum that actually sort of IS the case for SF, but I don't think their target audience is price insensitive for this reason.)
Anyway, I'm not a firearm user, but I think it's hard to make an incandescent light be weapon mounted and not go
, so that might well be part of the reason in this case.
BTW, the M20 is a nice light, I have one.
