I do not believe that they sell it as host, e.g. because of the glued driver and the lack of retainer ring.
Their C8F is for sale as host. They are not a company who does not sell hosts at all.
Personally, I do not expect them to offer the SP70 as host version as I think it would only be negligibly lower priced compared to the full flashlight. If you deduct the XHP70.2, the LED board and the driver they still need to get a reasonable margin and I do not not expect a host version sold for $ 25-30 less. It also depends on how much revenue they would make with a host version, especially if they offered it with a smooth orange peel reflector only. I think this is different in comparison to the widely used and more versatile C8S or C8F host they have for sale.
I mean if you haven’t seen the pattern yet… Forum asks for one thing in relative agreement and they end up doing whatever they want. Sometimes with explanation and sometimes not. It is what it is. Hopefully they know the “rest” of their market better than we think we do.
I would say this option was locked in and agreed upon 100%. It was the whole point of this project but then again so was the SMO reflector option.
I guess its hard to deal with companies that have a ever revolving door of reps that come and go fairly frequent. Every few months the reps change and a new one comes in and tries to out do the last one to save a few bucks to look good.
I don’t blame the reps they are paid very little and have to live in hostels with there team and are thrown in the deep end right away.
Plus you lose the rapport between us and the reps.
We have had numerous reps comment on this post. I have not seen a message from Tracey on this thread for a while.
Plus any one could be using that account?
We have had comments and feedback fromTracey, the Sofirn account and Barry? The Sofirn account has had multiple reps i have spoken to a few different reps.
I’m not really here to argue i am just stating that this is not helping the build having different info coming from different people.
Sofirn should really keep developing the SMO even if they end up not using it for this exact light.
If they put in the effort they could have a reusable host and choose a single die thrower LED (white flat, dedomed, SST40, whatever) w/ buck driver and immediately have a competitive new 1500M thrower…
Look at what Maxtoch did with the Shooter 2x. Seems to have stood the test of time and has evolved with multiple LED options (including XHP70). Now they also have a new larger shooter coming out with 2x21700 and a bigger reflector.
Each short cut Sofirn takes is probably costing them extra time in the long run and quality of future lights. They are designing too many entirely new lights and maintaining way too many inferior products. Spend the time to do it right and make something that will define your brand which you can make incremental changes to. Emisar, Olight, etc have people re-buying the same well designed lights in new LEDs/ano colors/metals all the time.