At $2.88 USD with free shipping, this was handily the cheapest headlamp tested. The main difference in this COB (Chips On Board) headlamp is that it uses an array of LED’s instead of 1 main one. This results in less glare, more widespread light, and means you can use smaller LED’s. The result is a “flood” style beam pattern, with a bit of a wide band in the middle that is brighter. Falloff at distance will be large, but for cooking and basic tasks around camp, the flood beam is fine. This headlamp uses 3 AAA batteries for power and weighs 82 grams with those batteries and a headband.
This headlamp comes with High, medium, and strobe modes. I think it’d be a lot more usable with an additional low power setting. Confusingly, the headlamp looks the same right side up and upside down, so you can sometimes mistakenly put it on upside down.
Light color from this headlamp was surprisingly good, and so was brightness, though it may be hard to see from the pictures. Beam spread was very wide at 160 degrees total vertically and essentially 180 horizontally.
Summary
Extremely cheap, lightweight, with a big flood beam, this headlamp would be great for close-in activities. It’s too bad it doesn’t have a true low power mode, but it’d be fine to hand off to the kids when you’re camping. Out of many of the headlamps, this is the one set I grabbed when I headed up to the attic to grab some things.
