Re: which is better?
You choose a tool for its ability to do a particular job: If you need to drive in a screw, you CAN hammer it in with a hammer, or the side of a pipe wrench, but, it works BETTER if you can screw it in with a screw driver.
A flashlight is a tool.
For example: Some lights have a strong wide floody beam that makes a large area bright at the same time, and some have a weaker wide floody beam that makes an area have dim lighting.
The more light a flashlight is making, the more energy it uses, and, the shorter time a battery can supply that much power....so, typically, the dimmer the light, the longer it can run.
Sometimes you want to see things farther away...but the floody beam that makes everything close up look bright enough, can't make far away things bright enough.....so, DIFFERENT BEAM type is used, where the same AMOUNT of light is concentrated into a SMALLER AREA, so the smaller area is brighter than the larger area, and, that smaller area can be aimed at things that are far away, to make the far a way things bright enough to see.
A light's THROW is how far the beam can make things bright enough to be seen.
In an advertisement on eBay for example, they can lie to you, so, no matter what they say, the light might be different...and you can't reliably compare them.
In an advertisement from a better light maker, or, a reliable seller, the real specifications might be used.
The specifications you want to compare, to make things easier, are LUMENS, which represent the TOTAL amount of light that the flashlight is sending out, and, the cd, which is a measure of the throw, or how FAR it sends that light out.
An ordinary 100 Watt light bulb might be rated at ~ 1,800 lumens....which would be the same as a bright flashlight.
If you had a 100 watt light bulb in a table lamp, and put the table lamp in the middle of a foot ball field in the dark, the light from that bulb would make it pretty bright all around the table, and pretty dim as you got farther away. ~ 50 meters away at the goal lines, it would be pretty dark.
If you had a 1,800 lumen flashlight, those 1,800 lumens are NOT spread out in a round pool surrounding a table. You could AIM the lumens at things in the stadium around the foot ball field, and see into the stands, etc. The same NUMBER OF LUMENS are focused into a tighter beam of light.
When you compare flashlights and head lamps, you want to consider what TYPE of beam is going to be most useful to YOU.
If you are going to do close up tasks, tying knots, cooking, reading, etc, a head lamp, or a lantern, will be able to make a pool of light right in front of you to evenly light that task. If you used a tight beamed flashlight for that type of task, the small bright beam would glare on what you were trying to see, and, you'd have to hold the light to point it at what you were doing, or else the beam might miss, etc.
If you need to see off in the distance, the soft pool of light that was nice to read with may not reach far away, and, you might want that tight beamed light that glared on close up work...because it's BEST for looking at far a way things.
So, if comparing head lamps, as they are MOSTLY used for close up work, you want more lumens, to see finer details, and, the ability to turn it to lower settings (Less lumens) for when you want to save battery life or not wake up the person next to you, etc. To compare throwers, you look at a light's cd rating (Higher is better).
The brightest headlamps might be putting out over 1,000 lumens (Armytek Wizard Pro for example), and the el cheapo ones might be putting out less than 100 lumens.
To put out HIGH lumen levels, rechargeable lithium ion cells are needed, as they pack more power into a smaller battery....and, they are rechargeable, so you don't need to buy more batteries over and over again.
For lower lumen levels (Weaker lights) you can also use rechargeable Nimh cells (Eneloops, etc), which have less power, but still save you from buying new batteries over and over again...and have decent run time.
For even lower lumen levels, and even less run time, you can use disposable batteries (AA, etc), and just keep buying batteries for it over and over again.
Until you have seen what ANY of these lumen levels look like, to YOU, its hard to compare and know what YOU'LL like/find good enough, etc.
Once you try some, you'll get a feel for "How Much is Enough", and so forth, and have some information to make good decisions.
Good Luck!
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