Okay,
Got a SureFire L6 in the mail today. As many of you already know, this LED light puts out a good light pattern. Although this particular one has a small dark donut hole in the middle of the beam. It does not show up in the pictures as the camera is metering and filling in the blanks.
Disclaimer here: This is just me with a Sony Digital camera, taking shots as the appear. My camera skills are really lacking.
The digital pictures make both lights look better than they are actually performing in terms of intensity and clarity of the hot spot.
The L6 from my eye's point of view is a more yellow/green and the Gladius is clearly more Blue/Purple
The L6 has a brighter but smaller corona than the Gladius. At 10 ft the Gladius' corona is approx 2 ft+ larger.
The Gladius has a more defined & intense (slightly larger) hot spot. I estimate the Gladius hot spot is 6 inches larger in diameter at 10 ft. This factor will start to really figure in as the distance to object/person of interest increases.
The reflectors on these two lights are radically different and certainly accounts for the different light signature easily seen by the eye, but not as distinct with the camera.
From my limited & totally biased point of view the Night-Ops Gladius might be the light of choice because of the additional functions (adjustable light/strobe), smaller package, less batteries to replace, waterproof, & from my vantage point a better light signature, certainly toe-to-toe at the very least. Less expensive to boot.
I may have said this somewhere before; we are currently conducting independent lab tests against a wide array of the competitors lights. The results will be publishable as fact.
