We derive individual distances to six Cepheids in the young populous star cluster NGC1866 in the Large Magellanic Cloud employing the near-IR surface brightness technique .
With six stars available at the exact same distance we can directly measure the intrinsic uncertainty of the method .
We find a standard deviation of 0.11 mag , two to three times larger than the error estimates and more in line with the estimates from Bayesian statistical analysis by Barnes et al . ( ( 2005 ) ) .
Using all six distance estimates we determine an unweighted mean cluster distance of 18.30 \pm 0.05 .
The observations indicate that NGC1866 is close to be at the same distance as the main body of the LMC .
If we use the stronger dependence of the p-factor on the period as suggested by Gieren et al . ( ( 2005 ) ) we find a distance of 18.50 \pm 0.05 ( internal error ) and the PL relations for Galactic and MC Cepheids are in very good agreement .