Amazon.com Customer Reviews
Bright, fits nicely, but light diminishes quickly - Review written on October 27, 2008
Rating: 4 out of 5
1 customer found this review helpful.
This is a nice unit, with a claimed 40 lumens of output on the highest setting, 20 lumens on mid, and about 8 lumens on low. Upon initial use, I found the high setting to be massively powerful that could easily blind my eyes if looked into directly. However, this high output was short lived -- lasting less than an hour. The unit has declining light power output as the batteries die, this will sneak up on you in a very ugly way if you need to use the light in the field and don't have immediate access to swap the batteries.
It's pretty clear why output isn't so long -- with only 3 AAA batteries powering the unit, it's too small. I would've liked to have seen 2 AA, or even better, 3 AA batteries powering the unit. This would allow for more MAHAs output; AAA's are quite puny in output compared to an AA. In fact, you can get 3x the output from one AA over an AAA.
The unit does fit comfortably as it has the middle band, preventing the whole thing from running down your forehead. I bought this to do night gardening and yard work, so I'm actively moving about. The previous headband light I had from Energizer didn't have the middle band, so was always slipping down.
The light beam is very wide compared to my energizer headband. Although this may seem good, sometimes it's a little too wide for my tastes. This is as the low setting becomes much too dispersed and weak to do any detailed work, so I have to put the unit on mid or high setting. This of course compromises battery life as discussed earlier. It would've been really nice if some kind of focal adjustment knob was incorporated into the unit.
So overall, this isn't too bad of a headband light but a little disappointing. Make certain you have a set of rechargeable AAA's available. Something like Sanyo Eneloops would be good, as they have decent energy reserves and can sit idle for a long time without discharge.