Blinded By The Light

So, right up front, I like SureFire flashlights, okay? I got into them at the very tail end of the incandescent era. The green G2 on the left was my first, a Christmas gift from a friend, and I carried it everywhere for a year or so and liked it so much I bought an aluminum-bodied Z2 to which I immediately added a GG&G "Tactical Impact Device", not so much because I thought I'd ever be putting a beatdown on somebody with my flashlight, but because it looked cool.

Eventually I upgraded from the incandescent Z2 (which is currently in the door pocket of my car and hence not in the picture above) to the LED Z2-S, second from left in the picture, which was marginally brighter and stretched a lot more life out of a set of batteries. It had a strobe setting, but the utility of the strobe was hampered by the fact that you needed to double-pump the button to activate the strobe; something I was unlikely to remember to do when faced with the imminent possibility of fool-shootin'.

Three years ago I bought the P2ZX Fury, second from right in the picture, and the most modern light in the shot. It's output is the full 500 lumens, with a hot center and good spill, which is pretty much the lower limit for effectively lighting a room as I discovered recently. The M3T CombatLight on the right, bought as dusty New-Old-Stock, puts out an almost quaint 125 lumens with the regular xenon bulb and is mostly included for scale. The picture above doesn't even include the Surefire lights on my carbine or shotgun or the X300U pistol light, either.

What the Z2, Z2-S, P2ZX, and M3T all share is the wasp waist, rubber ring, and handy lanyard necessary for the SureFire/Rogers Technique (demonstrated here by a different Rogers) but what they all lacked was any easy way to carry them, short of adding a carrier to my belt. As a result, I carried the Z2/Z2-S/P2ZX in the pocket of a shoot-me vest or winter coat or my purse...and when I got my hands on my little 75-lumen LED Lenser single-AAA light, I stopped carrying the big lights at all.

Until I got an email from SureFire asking if I'd be interested in trying one of their lights out that they thought might work for me.

Well, duh...

Let's unbox it like it's an Apple product!

Ooh!

Aah!

The E2D Defender Ultra uses a pair of CR123 cells and is slightly slimmer than the P2ZX. It boasts the same 500-lumen output and features a pocket clip. Looking at the pocket clip, it's pretty apparent that it can also be worn inside the waistband as a "tuckable" clip, if you're in the sort of place where people would lose their $#!+ over a flashlight. I can't imagine what such a place would be like, but we did just see newscasters come unglued at the thought of using a fire extinguisher, so one never knows what the next step on the descent of homo cubiculus will be.

In addition to the 500-lumen output, there's a 5-lumen "low beam" setting as well, more on which in the next post.

I've had it in my pocket for over a week now. So I'm about ready to offer some initial thoughts.
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