Excellent writeup. I’m stoked to see a decent and reasonably inexpensive offering that can use removable commodity cells. As you observed, the recent fixation seems to be to make “ultralight” bullshit with internal battery packs that are not user replaceable. The worst part is, the ultralight hiking community insists on lapping these things up and you’ll get ridiculed if you mention wanting a light with swappable cells. “Just carry a power bank and recharge it!”

The problem is twofold. First, there are nontrivial losses involved when you charge off of a powerbank, so you have to carry around extra size and weight in mAh just to break even on run time. Plus the ability to slap in a commodity primary cell in an emergency is helpful, or you can just carry 1-2 extra cells with you if you know your excursion is going to be long enough to warrant it. And when the internal battery inevitably wears out you can easily buy and install another one. But I’m sure Petzl or Black Diamond or whoever would much rather you buy an entire new light, instead.

At present I’m carrying a yum-cha brandless 18650 headlamp which works well enough for me, but I may have to investigate one of these instead. My current headlamp has been reliable (a lot moreso than both Black Diamond headlamps I had before it which mysteriously conked out like clockwork after about a year for no identifiable reason) but it doesn’t have any kind of mode memory nor does it have a control lockout. When it’s bouncing around in my pack during the day I stick the battery in it backwards. My usual EDC light is a Lumintop Tool 2.0 which can use a 14500 cell, so being able to use the same batteries will be nice. Although it’s not like I don’t have approximately 4.3 million spare 18650’s lying around anyway, which is why I bought a cheap 18650 light to begin with.