First light, last light.

[Millhouse]

I was going through my box of old kit and found my first proper LED light that I got back in about 2005.

A Surefire L4. A classic light back in it's day. Running on 2 CR123A batteries and producing a smooth floody 60 lumens. Opened the light and inside were 2 Surefire batteries with a best before date of 2015. Tried the light and it fired up fine.

Fast forward to 2026, and my latest light is a Fenix TK17. Running on a high capacity 6000mah 21700 and outputting up to 3600 lumens. A world apart from the Surefire.

Yet some how, after having a little play with the Surefire, I sort of miss it. Probably stopped using it over a decade ago and it has sat in storage since.

Now tempted to re-introduce it into my daily carry and see whether a single mode light with a fraction of the output of a modern light can work for me in 2026.

A couple of stock photos for reference.

[Farmer X]

60 lumens would work perfectly fine for my purposes; it's the CR123As I'd be unsure about. If memory serves me correctly, that's a button cell battery. I'd say give it a few days of carry and let us know how well it held up!

[enki_ck]

60 lumens would work perfectly fine for my purposes; it's the CR123As I'd be unsure about. If memory serves me correctly, that's a button cell battery. I'd say give it a few days of carry and let us know how well it held up!

Cr123 is not a button cell battery, it's the primary battery version of the 16340, or two of them stacked would be the now popular 18650, which some of these lights were capable of running on.

Yes, Millhouse, we grew accustom to pocket rockets now. Heck, my latest purchase is a Lumintop Tool 3.0, (the 2.0 has been my true EDC for years now). So a flashlight in the AA format pushing 900lm

Now compare that to the Gerber Infinity Ultra, the AA flashlight I EDCd 15 years ago with 5mm led

Do we need 1000+ lumens in our pockets? No. But it sure is nice to have the option (along with some everyday useable modes too

[Farmer X]

Cr123 is not a button cell battery, it's the primary battery version of the 16340...

Thanks for clearing that up!

[powernoodle]

Back in The Day, 60 lumens in a Surefire with an incan bulb that lasted 10 hours - and the filament broke if you dropped the light - was da bomb.  Insanely bright.  Tactical!

[charlie fox]

I remember buying a SureFire 6P in 1993-4 and thinking it was the brightest flashlight I'd ever seen! It was certainly brighter than the Maglite I was using. The batteries were a bit off putting at the time as they were hard to find and expensive. I used that light through the rest of my LE career and into the private sector, but it got put away when the bulb finally burned out in 2005 or so. I 2013 I bought a drop in LED and some new batteries and the love affair began again! Later that year I gave it to my oldest son, who still uses it. Not a bad return on investment.

[Grant Lamontagne]

With today's all new, high intensity darkness, night time is at least 60x darker than previous nighttime conditions, and so it's an absolute necessity that flashlights be much more powerful than before.  I recall the good old days when night time was barely dim (by today's standards) and a Mag Light with a paltry 178 lumens was enough to get by.

That wouldn't even count as a birthday candle nowadays.   

I like the old lights.  I still use a lot of them, and wish I had a few of them back.  I find myself longing for the good old Gerber Infinity Ultra or the original.... what were they called? The Squeeze light you kept on your keys?  They were basically a watch battery and a small LED in a plastic frame... damn, there were the smurf when they came out and now I cant even remember what they were called.

I hated the CR123 batteries, right up until I bought a rechargeable set of them, and it opened a new door to super powerful lights for me.  Then came the 18650's and I made sure to get rechargeable ones because those were some seriously pricey buggers!

I still like the AA and AAA lights, and I also like rechargeable lights.  The older ones are fine by me- I never felt that I needed to signal passing aircraft with the light on my keys.

Def

[powernoodle]

I recently bought a Maglite 2C (albeit the LED flavor), to get some of that retro feel.  It cranks out an incredible 180 lumens  , and uses disposable batteries to keep our nation's waste disposal personnel fully employed.

[PitCarver]

Mag light?
Now you're talking.

I used to love checking one out of the control room, when I worked in the penitentiary.  The 5D sized ones worked better than the old wooden nightsticks.