SureFire illumination tools are the finest in the world—compact, rugged, powerful, reliable, efficient. Engineered for maximum performance and precision manufactured, they produce optimal beams — brilliant light with no rings, hot spots, or shadows. That's why people whose lives may depend on having enough light when they need it, such as military, emergency, and police personnel and outdoors professionals, rely on SureFire.
Anodized Aluminum Alloy Construction
SureFire's aluminum-body WeaponLights are machined from a high-strength aerospace-grade alloy, making them extremely resistant to damage from impact, crushing, or bending, and allowing them to be made as small and light as possible without sacrificing strength. Note: Some of our lights are made of Nitrolon—see following section.
SureFire's Multi-axis Computer Numerically Controlled lathes ensure precision-machined components.SureFire's aluminum-body WeaponLights and flashlights are protected by a finish called anodizing. The anodizing process (from anode, the positive side of an electrical circuit) uses electricity and a chemical bath to "grow" a layer of aluminum oxide on an aluminum surface. Aluminum oxide is the second-hardest substance known to man, exceeded only by diamond, and certain anodized finishes can be made extremely hard, such as the Mil-A-8625 Type III Class 2 military specification finish that SureFire uses.
Nitrolon®
Some flashlights are made of relatively cheap polymers (plastics) such as ABS. SureFire's polymer WeaponLight and flashlight bodies are made of Nitrolon, a proprietary high-strength, non-conductive, impact-resistant, glass-filled polyamide nylon polymer. "Glass-filled" means that the polymer matrix has been mixed with fine glass fibers that add rigidity, abrasion resistance, and increased stability at higher temperatures.
Light Output: Candlepower vs. Lumens
The human eye responds most strongly to light nearest the 560 nanometer wavelength, which is a yellow-green color. Some manufacturers dramatize light output measurements by using candlepower units. They can get away with this because light measurement terminology is unfamiliar to most people. But the basic concepts can be explained as follows: The science of measuring light with respect to its effect on the human eye—which responds differently according to the wavelength, or color, of that light—is called photometry. Photometry includes measuring light intensity in a particular direction (in units of candlepower or candelas) and total light energy in a particular situation (measured in lumens).
With illumination tools, a candlepower measurement doesn't necessarily indicate total light output. To illustrate this, imagine representing a flashlight's total light output as a bag of sugar. If you pour the sugar onto a table to form a cone and measure the cone's height (representing the brightest part of the flashlight beam as measured in candlepower), you still wouldn't know the total weight of the sugar (representing the total light output as measured in lumens). Conversely, if we shake the table so that the cone settles and becomes rounded, the sugar's weight (lumens) would be the same but the height (brightest part of the beam) has been lowered and spread out.
Now take half the sugar from the demonstration above and put it inside a narrow conical container taller than the loose conical piles we made earlier. Even though this narrow cone's height (candlepower measurement) is greater than the previous cones, it contains only half the sugar (lumens). Reflectors and lenses are analogous to that conical container because they can create a light beam with a high-candlepower "hot spot" that sounds good in advertisements but tells nothing about total light output or light distribution within the beam.
SureFire uses integrating sphere photometers to measure the total lumen output of our illumination tool's, weighted with respect to human eye response. Other manufacturers have begun to follow our lead.
For the record, a lumen is 1/4 π of the total photon (light) flux emitted by a one-candela source. One candela is the luminous intensity of a source whose radiant intensity is 1/683rd of a watt of monochromatic light of wavelength 550 nanometers per steradian. A steradian is a conical figure, or solid angle, whose intersection with a unit sphere covers one unit area. Got it?
