Wonder why Surefire decided to wait until late 2011 to do this?
A multitude of excuses and explainations have been offered by the faithful here in past discussions. The military doesn't recharge batteries, SF makes a lot of money selling non-rechargeable cells, CPF'ers are not the target market, batteries in illumination tools have a small global financial and environmental impact etc.
To be fair, SF has produced rechargeable lights in the past as others have mentioned, somewhere I too have an old 9AN that uses the now environmentally out of favor nickel cadmium technology.
That's great news. I hope Surefire make the lights powered by 18650.
I would bet against it, hope I'm wrong. I'm guessing SF will somehow make the lights so that only special SF proprietary battery packs work. And these packs will cost, say $80.
This will be to protect the customer from substandard batteries of course.:naughty: I'm guessing SF will take a cue from similar high markup OEM consumables like printer cartridges and try to prevent non-SF aftermarket solutions from working in a SF light.
Or, am I wrong, will SF warmly embrace the use of off the shelf 18650's and RCR123's?
Many of us have actually run SF's on li-ion rechargeables for years and virtually all of the competing brands have supported rechargeables for a while now.
And, once SF offers the rechargeables, it will be touted in ad copy and posts here as a great advance in saving the whales, helping Nobel Laureate Al Gore prevent Global Warming and making the world a greener place.:thumbsup:
