I think headlamps are a wonderful and useful tool and I find myself using them a lot. Being able to see in dark conditions, aiming the light where you need it by looking in that direction and having both your hands free to work on whatever project or task you are doing in the darkness is a boon in overlanding conditions. I have never really paid that much attention to them though except to make sure they have the two features I always want. Those are, in no order of importance, 1) both a spot and a flood beam, in white, with adjustable brightness levels and 2) a red light also adjustable for brightness. Other features I have come across that have varied levels of usefulness to me have been a built-in rechargeable battery or even a swappable rechargeable battery like the old Petzl Core system (they now have a newer system also called Core) and a bit of wet weather protection is always nice.
I have never been a Lumen chaser as I have always expected that every few years when I need to replace my old headlamp that the newer one will be brighter and “better.” Same with price. Usually a $30 headlamp works fine but doesn’t have every feature I want or last as long as something in the $50-70 range. I’ve had Petzls, Black Diamonds, a Coast brand one time and someone once gave me a Black & Decker POS that never worked well and was quickly replaced. I did not hold that against them.
The last headlamp that I liked and worked well for me was a Petzl Tikka XP that finally started to slightly physically fall apart and is now in my “Spares” box.
My last headlamp was a Black Diamond Spot that was 200 lumens and in a clearance bin at REI for $25 and it worked…if not well than at least “okay.” Because of that Spot a new feature was added to my feature want list which is a power button that works when I want it to. You see the Spot had a button covered by a piece of silicon and when pushing down on it made a “click” sound at three different places on the ~2cm long button but only one of those click positions actually turned the lamp on or off. Before I figured that little tidbit out I probably tossed several sets of perfectly good batteries because I thought they were depleted. The annoyance finally became too much and I trickled it down for use on Gia’s collar for nighttime use. Unlike being worn on a human head, when it is attached to a dog collar it never needs to emit light in a horizontal direction and doing so would be blocked by her downward sniffing snout anyway. So when worn upside down I can make it brighten a range of territory in front of her – from slightly ahead of her to directly down at her feet in white or red mode. I can turn it to one of the white light settings if we are walking together at night. On solid white mode, it brightens a 3-5 meter zone down low in front of her which is useful for me (and probably for her as well). When she is cavorting out on her own can set it to solid or flashing red and I can still see where she is at.
Now that she uses the old Spot I needed a newer, better headlamp and decided to actually pay a bit more attention to features and less on cost. The last item I had that had a rechargeable battery and used a micro-USB power source was my Bose Mini Soundlink Bluetooth speaker. When that died I replaced it with a Bose SoundLink Flex 2 speaker which happily uses a USB-C cable like every other small electronic device I have and so I could carry only one type of USB cable. That meant, for the new headlamp, I wanted it to have the capacity to recharge via a USB-C cable as well. And since I am regularly out in places for long enough that I will need to recharge the built-in battery but might not want to bring a power source along, I wanted to option to just swap the battery pack or just use three regular, off-the-shelf AAA/LR03 batteries. I looked at options online and could never find all the information I wanted nor could I actually fondle the item and see how it felt and worked. I eventually stopped by my local(ish) REI and asked for directions to the headlamp aisle. After reading a half dozen boxes and narrowing it down to two different options I asked the closest green vest wearer if they could unlock one of each of the two options so I could examine them more closely. At first they balked and said something along the lines of what I once believed like “It’s just a headlamp, there is not much to look at.” Finding that answer unhelpful and unacceptable I said thank you and went to find a different “helper” and the second person was actually happy to unlock the bar the boxes hung on and let me read all the fine print without having to bend over or kneel down. They happily took one of the boxes and were reading its features along with me as I asked questions out loud about my headlamp desires. We finally came to the conclusion that the option which best met my needs was a newer offering from Petzl called the Swift RL (Amazon link).

While the price was a bit of a shock it is a trusted name brand that I had used and liked before and it was a huge upgrade in light output (up to 1100 lumens) versus the Black Diamond Spot (200 lumens). It also had a Reactive Lighting system which I had read about and thought might be a nice upgrade from constantly adjusting the light output manually for changing conditions. Other pluses were an ability to swap the battery pack (Amazon link) or charge it via the aforementioned USB-C cable. I miss the idea of being able to use regular AAA batteries in a pinch like any of the Petzl headlamps utilizing the CORE System but, so far, this rechargeable (2350 mAh) battery lasts longer than I expected and recharges pretty quickly. The best part though is that the little black button on the top that controls power and modes is a one piece, solid-feeling, only one click button. When I push it and hear and feel a click the change in light mode or power on or off just happens. Seems like a little thing that should reliably work but when it doesn’t (like with the Spot) it really can be annoying.

The USB port is actually built into the removable battery itself, reducing connections and wiring which lessens points of failure due to shock, flexing and general wear and tear.
I am used to single clicking or holding a control button to change between regular light modes or brightness levels in previous headlamps and this one is no different. When you first turn it on it is in the first, dimmest Reactive Lighting level. With each subsequent click of the button the Reactive mode goes up one brightness level (it has a maximum of four levels). After the fourth click the headlamp turns off. If you want the standard lighting (non-reactive) mode, after turning the lamp on you press and hold the control button and it changes to the Standard Mode (and then the red light mode if you keep holding it). Once in the Standard Mode, just as in the other modes, a single click changes brightness levels up three more times and the fourth click shuts off the lamp. Other headlamps I have had use a click and hold design to change levels of brightness. You click and hold and the light brightens until you reach the level you want and then stops there when you release the control button. If you continue to hold the light gets up to its maximum level and then reverses order and starts to dim. This headlamp only has the four brightness settings in both white light modes. If you are a fine-tuning perfectionist this might be considered a control limitation but, so far, it has shown enough adjustability for my needs. I am slightly disappointed that the red light has no brightness levels, only Continuous or Strobe mode but I’ll get over that I suspect. The Standard Lighting mode’s four levels of brightness are 10, 160, 280 and 700 lumens while the Reactive mode has ranges of 18 to 100, 25 to 275, 25 to 600 and 30 to 1100. I gotta tell you, 1100 lumens really is some serious levels of light blasting from your forehead and you really do need to be aware of people around you or you will blind and loose friends quickly.
While I am still getting used to the Reactive Mode use, right off the bat, the main thing that annoys me is the algorithm in that mode. When you physically cover the optical sensor (which I should expect to mean to the algorithm that the environment is getting darker) the light output increases. This seems to be the opposite of what you would actually need and the opposite of how the vast majority of smartphones with adaptive brightness or automatic brightness operate. In any phone I’ve ever had and had adaptive or automatic brightness turned on, the brighter the environment gets, the brighter the screen becomes to compensate. In outdoor, sunny brightness, the screen brightens to its maximum. In a dark room or at nighttime, the screen automatically dims because there is no need to overcompensate for much higher levels of brightness. I don’t know if I should be thinking or talking in lumens or candle power, but I think with regards to the phone screen I should be talking about NITS. Maybe the algorithm is written with the understanding or thought process of “if there is less ambient light to show you a wider area, then it will brighten in the local area to compensate.” The main problem with that is that the local area is then over saturated. The phrase Petzl uses is “a sensor to analyze reflected light” which might not be the way I am thinking about the varied situations and I will certainly defer to their professional design criteria. When reading about earlier versions of the Reactive technology, I was under the impression that it could tell when you looked up towards a person and would dim accordingly so as to not blind the person in front of you but I may be wrong about that. So far, when dealing with conversations in close proximity at night, I have been chastised for the bright light in someone’s face on more than one occasion. I quickly learned to not rely on the Reactive system and instead just manually set the headlamp to red light output in those situations. Also, when in Reactive Mode the automatic brightness adjustments seem a bit rough or twitchy to me. I remember reading somewhere online that this is the second version of the Reactive system and it is quicker and smoother when changing brightness levels when compared to the first version. If that is the case I would have hated Version One and look forward to whatever the next, improved version of the algorithm will be. All that being said, I am obviously not a designer of light sensing and changing algorithms and so my understanding of how they work and my opinions on them are suspect at best. I just know what I want and like. But, for sure, compared to a headlamp without a “reactive” algorithm this is a nice step up in usability and flexability.
Another small but important detail that I have found makes a difference in usability is the strap system.
This configuration with its double strap adjustment system is another improvement in my usage scenarios. Once slipped on your head you simply adjust the strap by grabbing the two plastic clips, one in each hand. To snug it up you pull them apart. To loosen, pull them towards each other. The two straps above and below one another also adds a larger contact area to the back of your head than what a single strap can do and so this stays on better in more positions and conditions.
Compared to any other headlamp I have ever owned and used this is the best so far. The brightness (when needed) is amazing. The battery life, especially in Reactive Mode, is also impressive. Frankly, much of my use of it is in smaller, dark areas and so I do not need full power which I am sure helps with battery life. It is lightweight (110 g), has an IP54 watertightness rating (which is more than enough to deal with rain) and comfortable enough to wear for longer periods of time when the need arises. The other feature I would have liked (beside adjustable red light brightness) would be the option to use plain old AAA batteries if need be.
The headlamp has a guarantee of 5 years which is all I would ever expect a headlamp to last in my world. The rechargeable battery on the other hand only has a 2 year (or 300 charging cycles) guarantee which seems less than I might expect but only time will tell. As I understand it (and as confirmed by a couple of AI search engines) “a lithium-ion battery charging cycle refers to the process of charging a battery from a low state of charge to full capacity and then discharging it back to a low state.” Knowing that, I am not going to keep a precise count of how many charging cycles I perform but, so far, over the three months I have owned this I have only charged it twice and neither of those times did I wait for it to completely run out of juice so I am hoping for the best. I expect I will eventually purchase a second battery pack (Amazon link) after this one has been used for a couple of years. The headlamp is a bit on the pricey side to me ($129 retail) but I have seen and paid a bit less than that and I am hoping and expecting to get my money’s worth out of it for years to come.