Malkoff Devices M60 LED Drop-In Review

In the last couple of years, the market for an easy-to-install LED upgrade for SureFire incandescent lights like the 6P series and other lights that use the P60/61/90/91 lamp assemblies, has exploded.
There is a veritable cornucopia to choose from, all the way from the cheap, Chinese made sub-10 dollar models of dubious and wildly varying quality, to the high-end modules put out by SureFire themselves and others.
Today, we're going to look at one of the non-SureFire offerings; the Malkoff Devices M60.

Malkoff Devices is a small operation, family run and they've been around for a few years now.
Malkoff Devices started out offering an easy LED drop-in upgrade for Maglite flashlights. The ease of installation and the phenomenal results were a rock-solid recipe for success and their popularity sky-rocketed.
Spurred on by popular demand, Malkoff Devices soon came out with their first LED drop-in for the SureFire P60-based lights, that are almost ridiculously abundant. Thousands of people have these lights in some form or another, many of them law enforcement and military.
So, it's a big market to say the least.
The M60 is an extremely worthy contender in this market!

The M60 is a simple module. It's a straight forward installation process. Unscrew the head of your flashlight, remove the original lamp assembly, drop in the M60, replace flashlight head, turn on flashlight, shine in face, spend the next 10-15 minutes blinking out the whitish-purple spots in your vision...
Ok, so don't do what I did when I first received mine. Really.

At an estimated output of over 235 lumens running on 2 CR123 lithium batteries, the M60 is a serious piece of hardware. So not only is it significantly brighter than the typical P60 lamp assembly, which puts out right about 60 lumens on a fresh set of batteries, but being that the efficiency of today's LEDs are so much higher than incandescent bulbs, the runtime is also significantly longer!
The M60 uses an excellent current regulator which gives you a very steady output of light for almost 1.5 hours after which it will start to dim before it eventually goes out, providing several hours of waning light. Compare that to the roughly one hour of battery life with the regular P60 bulb which only starts out at 60 lumens but then starts dropping in intensity almost immediately.

The module itself is made from machined brass and hand-engraved with the model type. Yes, hand-engraved. All of these are built by hand by Gene Malkoff. There is a contact spring at one end with the electronic guts sealed with black potting compound. The following pictures illustrate how nicely built this module is.



The LED is a Cree XR-E type, and it sits behind an above-average TIR optic.
Now, normally, I much prefer reflectors for my lights. In the past, I've found the optics to be rather severely lacking in their spillbeams, concentrating almost all the light into the hotspot. That's all fine and dandy, but it makes for a poor general use light, since it lights up almost nothing around the hotspot. Not particularly useful.

The M60 however, has a much better optic. There is a nicely defined hotspot that transitions smoothly into a wide spillbeam. Very useful.
It doesn't throw anywhere near as well as my LumaPower M1-T does, but for relatively close use, say out to 50 yards, it's very, very good.
The beam is relatively artifact free, and the few artifacts that are present are negligible when using it outside or in the house.

What's also nice with the M60 is the battery flexibility. I typically use mine with a 17670 lithium ion rechargeable battery, and if I need to, I can just replace that battery with two CR123s for emergencies. I can even take the M60 out and easily transplant it into another SureFire light, including the ones that use 3 CR123s.

And of course, then there's the longevity. These LEDs are rated to something along the lines of 30-50 thousand hours of life. Conceivably, once you have one of these modules, you can run it for the rest of your life. Being as they're also inherently shock-proof with no filaments to break, and Gene pots his modules extremely well, these would also work quite well in weaponlights!

All in all, I can only recommend the M60 and Gene Malkoff has a reputation for providing impeccable customer service.
You can buy yours at Malkoff Devices .
Check out his MagLite drop-ins while you're there!

Beamshots will be forthcoming!