You Light Up My Life

So, I love my Surefire EDCL2-T. I've been carrying it since I got it. It's hella bright, bank-vault solid, and the switchology is, I think, ideal for a tacticool CCW-type flashlight. It's reminiscent of the original non-clicky SureFire switch, where you push for momentary and either tighten or loosen the whole tailcap for constant-on or lockout. Additionally, a light push on the button gives a 5-lumen working light while a complete press releases all twelve hundred lumen-hounds.

But to get a continuously on light, you have to either keep holding the button down or tighten the tailcap, which some might find a bit fiddly. Also, while I'm the kind of gear nerd who thinks $175 for a flashlight is just hunky dory, that's a little chi-chi for a lot of folks (yes, this one was a free review copy, but I've paid more than that for SureFire lights in the past and will in the future.)

So I've been spending the last few days with the G2X Maxvision flashlight, to see how it does in comparison.

The switching is different, less tactical and more oriented towards the way normal Earth people use flashlights. One click on the tailcap gets you a 15-lumen beam, which is adequate for most tasks for which people use flashlights: finding dropped keys, walking down sidewalks without stepping in dog poop, finding your way to the outhouse on a camping trip, that sort of thing.

A second click gives 800 lumens of light, using SureFire's Maxvision beam shaping technology. The light is extremely even from one edge of the beam to the other, rather than a very bright hot spot in the middle that tapers off rapidly the further from the center you get. The high beam on this thing will let you find out what made that noise in the yard, because the high beam will light up the whole yard.

You don't have to hold the tailcap down to keep the light on, should you need to set it down and do stuff with both hands.

Its one real downside as an everyday pocket flashlight, to me, is that it didn't have a pocket clip. Without one, they wind up down in the bottom of the pocket of my mom jeans, getting dimes jammed  in the lens and the tailcap switch inadvertently pressed.

Fortunately I had a Switchback 2.0 lying around that had come in a package of stuff from Thyrm, and I installed it.

Once I realized it was supposed to have the clip to the rear and the ring forward, which allowed it to lie flat in my pocket, it made sense. It's comfortable and doesn't snag on stuff while in my pocket, and I now wish they made a version that would fix my EDCL2-T.

So for fifty bucks less than the current king of pocket tacticool flashlights, you could have the G2X + Thyrm Switchback 2.0 setup, and have a flashlight that may be more useful in day-to-day flashlight use.
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