Seriously, does anyone know how much Surefire underrates their lights' outputs?

By browsing through the forum, I know that Surefire actually lowers the lumen outputs on most of their lights, making them horrendously unattractive when being compared to even some of the crappiest lights out there.

Firstly, does anyone know the reason for this modesty?

Secondly, from your testings, how much lower does Surefire usually set their rating?

Consider an example from
http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb...quot-Fury-quot-500lu-flashlight-thread/page13 (viewed 18 Oct 2012)
and the extracted chart below, made by Robert_M (thank you for your hard work), I can see that the 500 lumens Surefire Fury is on par or even slightly brighter than the supposedly 720 lumens EagleTac P20C2 flashlight (assuming that the equipment was reasonably accurate and it was a fair representation of performance). Some simple number crunching indicates that for this particular light, a reduction of approx. 20% is observed. Is this the norm for every Surefire, a reduction of approx. 20% lumens from the total output?

I like Surefire lights, that's pretty obvious, but I'm trying to be objective here. It's very hard to compare the lumen outputs of different brands when Surefire measures theirs one way (which lowers the lumens) and other brands many other ways (which increase the lumens)!

Feedback please.

I know EagleTac advertises both LED lumens, and out the front lumens. For example the current P20C2 MKII is said to have 750 lumen, but on the specs, it states that this is LED lumen, and the actual out the front number is 550 lumen. I don't like how they do this, I think it's deceiving.

Given that the actual out the front value is around 500 lumen, the Eagletac and Surefire are pretty comparable output wise.

Gunner12 said:

I know EagleTac advertises both LED lumens, and out the front lumens. For example the current P20C2 MKII is said to have 750 lumen, but on the specs, it states that this is LED lumen, and the actual out the front number is 550 lumen. I don't like how they do this, I think it's deceiving.

Given that the actual out the front value is around 500 lumen, the Eagletac and Surefire are pretty comparable output wise.

Click to expand...

There's your answer. Surefire measures lumens according to ansi fl-1/otf. Other manufacturers (not all) tend to rate their lights in led lumens.

Imo, budget lights tend to advertise led lumens while established manufacturers provide ansi fl-1 measurements or sometimes both otf and led lumens.

I agree with gunner, this is deceiving. Much like Jetbeam advertising single aa lights rated at 550lm when in fact it only reaches 550lm on a 14500 cell and only 150lm, more or less, on an aa primary. Not to mention losing all the other modes when running on a 14500.

I'd stick with manufacturers that advertise what their product is capable of and not give bloated numbers. Aside from surefire, foursevens, klarus, fenix, sunwayman and a few others I may have forgotten to mention are pretty honest about their numbers. I may be wrong but this is what I've learned as a newbie flashaholic =)

Cheers!


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Thanks for the above post.......I find it interesting and good to know.

It's like someone touting how their vehicle has so and so dry weight.

I usually go, "DO YOU DRIVE YOUR RIDE WITHOUT ANY OIL AND GAS?!"

They usually shut up right after that.

I can't wait for the LX2 Ultra. Really, 600+ lumens in a slim form with TIR? TAKE MY MONEY ALREADY!

But, knowing the minimum gas needed for a run and meeting weight requirements for a race class makes dry weight is important. Eagletac states both emitter and ANSI. Dont see a problem with it. I do think Surefire under rates their lights. Dunno why.

Surefire builds their lights to meet minimum standards. Take any one of their lights and assume that a particular specimen has 1. an underachieving emitter, 3. bad driver, 4. resistance in the light body, 5. poor switch, etc. This light WILL meet the advertised lumen output. Most lights don't have any issues and are above what they are rated for. Basically, they guarantee you will at least get what the numbers on the box say.

Surefire_for_all said:

Firstly, does anyone know the reason for this modesty?

Click to expand...

I'll tell you first that this phenomenon is nothing new for Surefire. In fact, I'd venture to say that their underrating of start-up lumen output was more severe in the past. The main reason for this is that for much of their life as a company, Surefire only built lights with incandescent bulbs that mostly operated in what we now refer to as direct drive mode. Thus the output that you saw right at start-up, with fresh batteries, would begin degrading, albeit slightly, almost immediately.

This left Surefire with two dilemmas - how to rate output (when the output level was constantly changing), and how to rate run time. In the case of the former, they made the decision to be conservative with their ratings and advertise a lumen number that would reflect actual output after some reasonable amount of runtime. As for the latter, they were very straightforward in specifying that their run times reflect the elapsed time it would take to get to a certain percentage of the maximum output level. I think it's safe to say that most of their customers appreciated this honesty even as the practice could give the appearance to the uninitiated that the output of their products didn't quite stack up to some of the competition.

Very well said.

For the uninitiated, the issue is often less the particulars of what SF does or how or why, and more a questioning (doubting) of the following SF has, in the face of such 'overwhelming' evidence to the contrary.

This thread reminds me of the expression "SureFire Lumens" that we used to see frequently before manufacturers started using the FL-1 standard. Nevertheless, I'm still finding that SureFire is conservative compared to most other manufacturers.

Robert_M said:

This thread reminds me of the expression "SureFire Lumens" that we used to see frequently before manufacturers started using the FL-1 standard. Nevertheless, I'm still finding that SureFire is conservative compared to most other manufacturers.

Click to expand...

And with a few exceptions, such as the Fury, SureFire doesn't use the FL-1 standard. They generally rate runtime on high down to 50 lumens (possibly because they consider that below the "tactical" level). For the Fury, 10% just happens to be 50 lumens, so whether that's intentional or a coincidental I don't know.

I don't always believe the FL-1 standard either. Some companies, like Streamlight, Mag and Fenix and a few others I trust. But I can't believe that some of the "low end" companies go to the trouble of testing their lights. They fudge so much, why not the output? The trouble with FL-1 is that individual companies are allowed to test their own lights. It would be better if there was a independent and respected organization that would test all lights, such as Underwriters Laboratories does for electrical equipment. Then I think that FL-1 would be more reliable.

Thanks guys for the useful information.

It's been 6 years! I still have my E2D with me almost everyday, but now it's looking tattered and under-powered. The glass window has many cracks in it, the aluminium body is shining silver at places and there are many dents. Despite all of those, it's still working well, a true companion indeed.

But it cannot be compared to my friends'. Their LEDs are so much brighter and run longer so I thought I should get something smaller, and last week I purchased an E1B (to which Surefire will upgrade these very soon, as I later found out :sigh. I guess I can't keep up with the technology.

Is there a way to upgrade this E1B to EB1? I could perhaps purchase the head to go with it, but that might be hard.

On another note, I had looked around at Youtube videos and found that lumen ratings are so ridiculously high and varied with the other manufacturers, hence this post. It is disastrous if our troops are getting less equipped than the Chinese army's. I hope it is not the case.

IMO, FN-1 is the industry's "best practices", but since it is self-regulated, it doesn't mean much, not to the manufacturers, not to us.