Best 123 Lithium

What is the best 123 Lithium cell for use in Arc & SF Lights?
Also where do you buy them.
TIA
Tim.

I like Surefire batteries. Havent had a problem with them yet <knock on wood>. Others will disagree tho.

The limited number of Maxells that I used were short lived. I had only one Duracell die early and mixed results with SureFire (from the best to the worst). Again, my sample quantity is too small to be considered reliable. If we all pool our results a general trend may appear.

Like the Luxeon Lottery, I believe there can be great variation in the manufacture of lithium cells - even from the same run with the same brand.

I have had more than one set of SF with short run time, and reaching shut down long before I thought they should.

Has anyone tried Sanyo or Toshiba? I have found the Sanyo rechargeable AAs to be superb in my hand held Ham radios. I have not tried the Toshiba. I recently ordered Sanyo from BOTACH, and if they do not have Sanyo they substitute Toshiba and vice versa.
Personally, without much experience, I would have rather have the Japanese brands than others except the Surefires. I don't know who makes them. In the AA rechargeables the Japanese brands are superior in my opinion.

Jerry

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Has anyone tried Sanyo or Toshiba?

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i am currently using Sanyo and have had no problems with them.
I did get two different types in the same shipment. Packages looked the same but the batteries had different type labels. I checked the voltage on a DMM and one type was right at 3.0 volts and the other was at 3.25 volts. Overall I am happy with their performance and pay $1.25 ea.

I am using Varta 123s and pay EUR2,70 each (I am in Germany, so life is more expensive on cool goodies /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon15.gif ). Haven't had any problem with them so far (used about 60-70 untill now), and they perform well.
Out of the 20-30 SF 123s I used there was one that dies early.
bernhard

I used to use Panasonics at $1.100 ea and had excellent results. I tried some "Universal" brand at $0.99 ea and wasn't all that impressed. I still have a dozen Surefire batteries but have not tried them yet except for the 2 that came with my G2Z and have been pleased with those

I run SF123's and Duracell Ultras, I have experienced the short runtimes with the Surefire 123's but you can't argue with the price, so I keep a lot of spares handy to compensate.

Tim B,
PM me your address and I will send you a few samples of ours. I think you will find them to be every bit as good as anything you have tried and they cost $1 each.
Duracell makes the SF.

Kevin,

Funny, I was about to ask about anyone using your 123s. Can you tell us who makes yours? /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Tim_B , Hi and welcome to CPF. My name is Tim Benford, and even tho I use the screen name KartRacer31, many other CPR'ers know me by my real name, and I always use my real name when making purchases thru CPF. To avoid any confusion I was wondering if you would be willing to choose some other screen name? I feel strange asking that, but I think it could save some confusion for both of us. Thanks -Tim

I have purchased a number of Toshiba batteries from Bot@ch and have very good results with them. Some of the Surefire batts I have used seemed to have very short run times and others great run times, when used in the same flashlights.

I bought over 500 Surefire batteries this past year and personally used about 150 of them with technicians working for me using the rest. I have never had a bad cell and never had anyone report any problems (and I asked). I have also done many runtime test with the SF's always getting more runtime and even more so with HOLA's.

I have heard that Surefire batteries are optimized for the high current requirements of the brighter tactical flashlights, like their M6. Is this true?

I'll even bet you heard it from Surefire. They are good batteries, but their talent lies in making lights. Not batteries. I have had several sets slide down the discharge curve faster than I thought they should, and a couple to reach critical fail level rather quickly.

It was also amusing that my new A2 came with batteries installed, and set of instructions that said not to store the batteries in the light for long periods of time. Go figure.

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Bravo25 said:
I'll even bet you heard it from Surefire. They are good batteries, but their talent lies in making lights. Not batteries. I have had several sets slide down the discharge curve faster than I thought they should, and a couple to reach critical fail level rather quickly.

It was also amusing that my new A2 came with batteries installed, and set of instructions that said not to store the batteries in the light for long periods of time. Go figure.

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No, I didn't hear it from SureFire. I read it in a post somewhere on CPF. But my question was about the design of SF batteries. Are they constructed differently from other 123s to perform better in high current applications? It's another matter how well they succeded or how good their quality control is.

One would need a pretty large sampling to make a authoritative comparison between different brands. Consumer Reports has done some studies like this on the more common batteries. I would be interested to know if anyone had done something like this with 123s.

I have also gone through over 200 SF's now, and not had one fail early and I am usually not a lucky person. I have tried just about every other brand and I can say with confidence (lots of runtime testing) that the SF have the longest average runtime. As jtivat said they last even longer in high output lights like the 12PM and P61. In the 12PM they run about 1/3 longer then any other battery I have tested, the next closet was the Duracell Ultra's. Many of the cells went in to thermal shutdown in less then 2 min.

I ran a test awhile back...

Runtimes (Excel spreadsheet)

In our lights, Duracells ran the longest on average.

Peter

Thanks Peter,

Nice to have actual data to look at. I am wondering about the claim that SureFire specs their batteries to perform better in high-drain usage conditions.

I don't know enough about 123 construction to know if your results, using the Arc LS, would likely to be different if the same test had been done on a much higher draw light, like the SF M6.

The posts above from jtivat and brock reporting their experience with 500 and 200 SF batteries seem to support the SureFire claim.