Hey guys, Is there a reason why Surefire are SO EXPENSIVE? Some of the outputs are far less but pricing is crazy though. I really like a few of their lights. But pricing seems a bit extreme. 2 used as examples below.
UDR Dominator $1,370
E 20 Defender $200
Thoughts
Cost of production and i think they have a long warranty maybe lifetime? Id say its because they have limited to no competition in the local market.
I don’t believe cost of production is as big factor as people say considering most other American industries can at least be as competitive as others overseas. Dewalt is made is the USA priced better than most Japanese tools on par with Makita at least for example.
In some companies corporate and patent lawyers are thought to be a piece of unavoidable overhead.
For Suref* they are the guardians of the galaxy, the mean team, the money makers.
If you think Suref* has invented all those things by itself…… But they Sure own the patents to it.
They’re not pricing their products for the individual purchaser, their market segment is selling, via contract, to the government.
There are many reasons why expensive, even now they have stock of old parts as one example not mentioned. Tail cap broke, they will send a new one free of charge out . So yes, pricey at times up front, providing not lost/stolen, your looked after for life. If thats worth the extra cost, thats the buyers choice to make that decision. As BLF caters more for budget lights, surefire i presume is not too popular. I am not taken in by some of their new lights, but i do like some of the classics for hosts, Z2,6p,c2,m2 and E series to name some. Some of which can be found at reasonable prices, E series do command quite a heft, but are desirable with collectors.
Also if looking on the surefire site, you can find said lights for quite a bit less with a little searching. Retail is pretty crazy on some lights………….
Malkoff, HDS,Surefire are all quite expensive compared to other manufacturers. But you are covered by life time warranty , tank build, potted and more aimed for the forces type use. If its life/death use, then many wont buy anything else but the said brands.
Many different triples and quads(xhp70 as well) in there, some vinh, some Tana,other CRX 219b h17f. Modern engines with classic hosts for me, some of my fav lights
My last surefire was an E2e way back when they were first introduced, had it one year and sold it. No regrets!
Love the E2e, yes a little weak with the bulb but i am enjoying some incand here and there. I had one of the heads sent to Tana for a triple 219b h17f, the love got stronger! I do like the compactness of the E lights, feel tiny compared to the 6p etc sizes. The E1e sometimes gets the E2e triple head, just to change things around and have a more EDC able light.
And then you go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like “I love you”…
(My 2 cents)
If you think back to the early 2000’s when SureFire started making big waves in the flashlight arena, their only competition was MagLite. So for $50 you could buy a 6 D-cell monster of a MagLite that had 50 lumens, or you could get a “tiny little” SureFire C2 with a Hi-Pressure Xenon bulb for $100 and it had 120 lumens! The brighter they got, the more expensive they got. All while MagLite sat around and watched their market share dwindle year after year.
Fast forward almost 20 years and people assume their SureFire is the brightest and best flashlight out there! After all, it was 20 years ago; why wouldn’t it be the same today? So people keep buying and assuming 2000 lumens = $300.
Enter compeditors like Streamlight, Olight, Inforce etc. They say “heck, we can make a 2000 lumen light and sell it for a couple bucks cheaper and people will still pay for it! Why undersell ourselves when SureFire taught everyone flashlights are expensive?”
People still buy $1000+ iPhones every year while competitors make very similar phones for sometimes half the price (Google, Huawei, Xiaomi, Lenovo…)
Haha , i do love the little E lights though! 
As an aside, I bought one of the very first Surefires back in the mid 1980’s right after they first came out. I believe it was called the 6P and boy, it was expensive. It was $39.99, (which would be almost $100.00 today), but it was a revelation compared to what was available back then.
On top of that a lithium 123 cell was $8.00 which would be almost $19.00 today!
I have quite a few surefire lights, probably more than any other brands. 3 6P, 1 C2, 1 G2, 2 G2x pro, 1 fury, 1 E2D. I recently acquired a E1L, at 45/3 lumens. Crazy right? What would I do with 45/3 lumen in 2019? But it looks cute!
Plan to get a G2X-MV.
Yes I like surefire overall. But I still try to keep the cost down if possible.
Very cool, i like my crazy lumens like the next guy. But in reality , i dont need 10’s of 1000’s of lumens all the time. Work i can get by with 100-200lm from a lamp, home maybe up to or around 600lm for dog walks………….enough to fight past most artificial lighting(street lamps etc). But sometimes, if i need to light a field, then i will take a big gun. Sometimes i want a little nostalgia, be it c2 incand, or E incand, it is a nice 100CRI beam. Even today, the p60 incand of surefire (maybe 50-60lm)is a very nice beam. With so many LED’s lights, its nice to have a little old school thrown in. Of course each to their own, it would be a lot less interesting if we all liked the same 
Most of my programmable drivers are set to a single mode level, clicking through modes for me grows old fast. I want to click on, click off some times, knowing each time what i am getting. So even though my old classic surefires have modern day engines, quite a few are programmed for simple stupid.
I read an article years ago about SureFire. At the time they were getting into military builds the industry didn’t have any standards for durability. Story goes that one of the engineer’s tossed his into a drier set on high for an hour. Light comes out working great but lots of the enamel in the drier got chipped. It was his drier/wife’s drier who wasn’t too happy. SureFire bought the engineer’s wife a new drier. Looking at the new specs SureFire is closing the gap and keeping quality standards higher than the rest.
This picture of Paul always makes me smile, PK who helped surefire become who they are. His ideas into actual lights, a true flashlight genius . Now this is a work desk!
This.
Some manufacturers, like Surefire and HDS, put a premium on durability and reliability and are known for it. These manufacturers are then able to charge a premium for it. Their lights may not be the flashiest, most modern, or have the highest outputs, but they should be reliable.
Put another way… if you were going to spend all day in a Cave and could only have 1 light, would you want the latest high output light? … or would you want the most reliable light possible?
Great information guys. I have know about Surefire for years prior to collecting. The draw back to me adding to collecting is pricing aspect.
Never questioned quality rather pricing.
That essentially nailed it right there. I am near Ft Bragg and surefire could be found at yard sales. The xenon bulbs and form factor was amazing.
I agree with some of the other comments about reliability. If you are going into a potentially (or not so potentially) life threatening situation, what do you want to carry? A light with a rock solid reputation for reliability and quality, or the latest and greatest that works most of the time but might break when it hits that rock while you are diving for cover. My first really good light was a G2, back when it was significantly cheaper that the 6Ps and C6s. Even today I have two G2s and a 6P, even if they all have third party LED drop ins. I still have all the P60s tucked away.
I have had some experience with government contracts from the vendor side. The proposal evaluators don’t look at price until your proposed solution/device has passed all the criteria that has been specified, like number of on/off cycles, drop tests, IPxx standards, etc. Only after your solution has passed all of those exams do they look at your price, delivery, and warranty details. And the manpower needed to make sure your offering does meet all that criteria adds considerably to the product overhead, and thus the individual price. So now you’ve got the contract, at a price of $nn per, and have had enough requests that you decide to also place your device on the civilian market. If your contracting overhead was $pp, do you deduct that when you price your civilian model, and run the risk of having some purchasing agent deciding that since you passed so and so’s criteria, they can just go out on the civilian market and buy however many hundreds that they want and save all that money? Or do you price the civilian model close enough to the contracted price that it doesn’t pay the purchasing agent(s) to cut corners and buy on the open market rather than paying the contracted price? Most people have no idea that decisions like that are part of the pricing model in many cases.
If you consider ‘reliable’ to mean ‘withstands crashing on rocks’ Surefire might win. However if ‘reliable’ means ‘I can reliably shine two blocks down and see that the man is only carrying a grapefruit, not a hand grenade’ Surefire might lose.
Saying a Surefire is reliable is like saying a World War II rifle is reliable, sure it’s true, but it’s outdated.
It’s not until you hold a modern 21700 thrower that you realize the 100 extra yards of throw and 1000 more lumens might have let you see a further threat and thereby saved your butt.