[carrot]

Please view the original at my website, which includes loads of excellent photos.
Gearcarrot.com SureFire Saint Review

***
The SureFire Saint is a phenomenal headlamp. It is SureFire’s first foray into the headlamp market, and it does not disappoint.



The SureFire Saint is extremely well-designed, every facet elaborately engineered and carefully thought-out, to create one of the finest examples of SureFire’s dominance in high-end illumination tools. Over the decades, the SureFire brand has come to be universally recognized as a guarantee of excellence, reliability, and high quality, and the Saint comes from this proud lineage.

In this review, I have tested the full-size SureFire Saint. The Saint Minimus is another configuration that comes without the battery pack, using a single CR123A and is much lighter and more compact. I did not test the SureFire Saint extensively in Minimus mode, but much of this review still applies.



The SureFire Saint is a serious headlamp. It is constructed out of hard anodized aluminum and Surefire’s proprietary fiberglass-reinforced nylon polymer with the result of a headlamp that feels as tough and indestructible as SureFire’s other lights. SureFire rates the output at 100 lumens for 6.5 hours, 10 lumens for 48 hours, and 1 lumen for a whopping 144 hours when using the battery pack with 3 CR123A’s. Runtime is considerably shorter when using a single CR123A but it remains as bright.

One interesting note is that in Minimus mode, the Saint can be used upside-down equally well for a left-handed user, but as the full-sized Saint it cannot be used upside-down due to the battery pack.



After properly adjusting the straps, when you put it on, one of the first things you notice is just how comfortable it is. Despite the added weight of the battery pack, the headlamp sits comfortably balanced on your head, with the third strap helping to redistribute the weight. Soft neoprene strips cover the backsides of the battery pack and the lamp, and a small cutout in the back of the battery pack means it doesn’t press against the pointy bone at the back of your skull. The straps use flat metal adjustment loops, which SureFire advertises as being more comfortable than the standard plastic adjustment loop. I am not convinced that it is more comfortable (although I could not feel it against my head), but if nothing else it is a nice touch that should be a stronger, more durable and more reliable alternative to the standard plastic, which is prone to becoming brittle and cracking, especially in cold weather. It would suck pretty hard to have to hold up a headlamp when its main purpose is hands-free illumination.

Also of note is that the SureFire logo is everywhere on this headlamp when in the full-size Saint mode, making you a walking billboard for SureFire. If you are a die-hard SureFire fan like me, then you will love this, otherwise it may be a minor annoyance.



SureFire chose to use a straight cable instead of a coiled one on the Saint to minimize tangles and for better durability. The cable housing appears to be quite thick and tough, which should eliminate issues of kinks or poor connection due to wire degradation. SureFire has a complicated “cable management system” to accommodate different head sizes and helmet setups that works very well, although it seems like overkill. I initially had concerns that the cable would get snagged on something or that the snaps would be irritating on my head but in the dozen or so hours I have been testing the Saint I have encountered neither issues.



Unlike the competition, the Saint uses a knob to control the light, much like the volume knob on a stereo. Turn the knob clockwise, and the output raises. If you keep turning until it stops, you have 100 lumens. Turn the knob counter-clockwise, and the light output dims. Somewhere in the middle of turning the knob you can feel a light detent, which SureFire has wisely placed at a comfortable level for general use, about 10 lumens. All the way counter-clockwise is another detent, signifying that the light is completely off. The knob has a very good, high quality feel to it, extremely smooth with a firm action, as expected from SureFire. It has machined grooves that assist with grip and can be comfortably used with gloves.

This user interface (UI) is extremely intuitive and superior by far to anything competitors use, as most competitors use one button, at most two, to control the output and the user must cycle through several unwanted light output levels to get where they want.

One option that would be nice to have is a turbo mode, activated by a momentary button, as some Petzl headlamps have. However, in practice I have not found it necessary, as it is easy enough to spin the dial to quickly check something out. Another nice option to have would be to have a lower low output level, as 1 lumen is still too bright for reading with night-adapted vision.

The Saint can also be tilted vertically 180º, which allows the user to aim the light however he wants, as well as turning the lens of the headlamp into its holder to protect the lens from scratching in storage, which is some kind of optically clear plastic.

Speaking of the lens, many early adopters of the Saint complained of strange artifacts in the beam such as rings and a distinct image of the LED die. In my personal sample of one, and my brief usage of a friend’s Minimus, there are no rings and only extremely minor artifacts that are completely invisible in normal usage. I could only discern the faint artifacts when using the Saint on a white wall, which suggests that any lens issues have been solved in the current production models.

In any case, the Saint creates a beautiful rectangular flood, softly tapering off on the sides, providing excellent lighting within my field of view. Unfortunately some headlamps have tight beams instead of soft floods, which cause tunnel vision that can be disorienting or hard to navigate by.

For those of you who wear glasses, you will be happy to note that I wore glasses during most of my testing and did not get the backscatter that some popular headlamps have where the light reflects off the glasses lenses and into your eyes.



The Saint battery pack is also very elegantly designed. There are two flip locks that ensure the battery pack is secured, but are also easy enough to manipulate with gloves. SureFire realized that their target market for the headlamp may choose to bring the headlamp on adventures where CR123A’s can be hard to find, and so made this the first SureFire designed to use AA batteries (prototypes aside). The battery pack is fully sealed against water intrusion and is rated submersible by SureFire.

Additionally, for users who wish to shed some extra weight, the battery pack is completely removable, unscrewing from the lamp and unclipping from the headstraps. Owners of the SureFire Saint get a battery cap that fits a single CR123A and essentially converts the Saint into the Minimus.



Cleverly, the SureFire Saint will happily take one, two or three CR123A’s in parallel in its battery pack. It will run at full power with only one CR123A and will run for a suitably long time – 1.5 hours on high and 50 hours on low. On three CR123A’s, with its runtime of 6.5 hours on high and 144 hours on low, the Saint truly excels when long runtimes are a prime concern, especially when working in a dirty or wet environment where you don’t want to have to change batteries. CR123A’s are excellent when power density (high runtime or high output), cold weather performance, or low weight are important factors.

Since the Saint uses CR123A’s in parallel, it is should be considered unsafe to use any kind of lithium-ion rechargeable technology in this light. SureFire’s official stance on using RCR123’s in this product is “don’t do it.”



However, as mentioned earlier, the SureFire Saint will happily run on two AA batteries, and unsurprisingly uses them in serial to match the voltage of the CR123A’s. I tested the Saint on Eneloop LSD NiMH batteries and could not discern a difference in output as compared to running on CR123A’s. The Saint’s ability to use AA batteries opens up the possibility to use an inexpensive rechargeable solution, as NiMH technology is relatively inexpensive, readily available, and considered extremely safe. I strongly recommend using genuine Sanyo Eneloop batteries when choosing NiMH rechargeables, for their excellent performance and other reasons I will not get into here. (CandlePowerForums is a great resource for battery information.)

The Saint will try its very best to not leave you in the dark. When the power runs low, it will dim down gradually until the batteries can no longer sustain any kind of LED output. However, if the batteries are very low, the Saint may not be able to fire up again after being turned off. In that situation, it is best to actually just leave the Saint on rather than turning it on and off to preserve battery life.

Overall, the SureFire Saint, either the full Saint or the Minimus is a real winner. It is expensive, but every bit worth SureFire’s asking price (at the time of this review, $185 or $139, respectively) if you need a headlamp, especially if you enjoy owning the best of the best.

Highly recommended without reservation.


by carrot