Telescoping Darth (after): It's still unknown which is rarer, the telescoping Darth or the telescoping Ben, but one thing that's for sure is that these figures are the two rarest loose Star Wars figures. I don't even want to know what a carded version of these would fetch on the secondary market.

Not very many loose specimens of the Darth figure seem to exist. You would be lucky to have the opportunity to find one. I spent years looking for these figures before I managed to find both the Ben and the Darth from reliable sources. There are reports that even the telescoping saber figures are starting to be faked.

It is very common for people to confuse these telescoping saber figures with the more common production figures. The lightsabers appear to be the same in certain photos but the major difference is in the features of these sabers. The common production lightsabers have a thick stem and a fixed, short thin tip that extends about 1 cm from the stem. The telescoping sabers also have a thick stem and short tip, but the thin tip slides in and out of the the thick base of the same color. Look at the before and after pictures for these telescoping saber figures to see the effects of this telescoping feature. If a Ben/Luke/Darth saber does not extend as far as the after shots of these figures, then it is not a telescoping saber.