If you’re anything like me you may not have heard of Nightstick flashlights until now. You’ve heard of Surefire and Streamlight (maybe you can’t afford them but you’ve heard of them). The natural assumption is they’re a new company that may not be around in six months. Actually, Nightstick is an up and coming company that is best known in industrial settings for the last 7 years. Better yet Nightstick is subsidiary of Bayco, a company that’s been putting products on the shelves of Lowes and Home Depot for 30 years now.
When Nightstick offer up the TAC-560XL for review it was clearly a go big or go home moment. In this product they are providing far more in one package than any competitor I’ve seen at a much better price point. The TAC-560XL is a compact all aircraft aluminum, extreme lumen, rechargeable tactical light for $80. That’s 33% less than the Amazon
Streamlight’s Strion LED HL rechargeable which provides less in every ANSI statistic and unlike Streamlight you won’t pay extra for a rapid charger or DC plug.
The Nightstick TAC-560XL provides a blinding 800 lumens on its high setting, 350 lumens on medium and 140 lumens on low with a 600 lumen strobe setting. The run time is a respectable 2 hours on high or as much as 8 3/4 hours on low. If that’s not enough for you a battery sleeve is provided to allow the use of cr123 batteries. You could also just drop it into your charger which is provided with both AC and DC options.
We certainly proved the light was rugged and waterproof in our testing. But the real genius in this light lies in it’s reflector. CREE LED bulbs put out a lot of light. Bright, clean light that travels in all directions. This light fills the room and is measured in lumens. The higher the lumens the brighter the perceived light in the immediate area. When the proper shape of reflector is used that light is concentrated into a beam. The more the beam is concentrated the further the distance usable light will be visible. This concentrated light is measured in candela. The problem is when you concentrate light to increase candela you tend to loose the lumen levels. The point is Nightstck has made a nearly ideal reflector in the TAC-560XL! They managed to give the light a solid range of useable light while maintaining an amazing 800 lumens of room filling brightness!
In short, the durability, lifetime warranty, and balance of runtime, lumens and candela make this the best all around light I’ve seen anywhere. Nightstick is on a mission to put Streamlight and Surefire out of business. See all their products at www.mynightstick.com