Pics snipped to shorten post.
You are quite right that it would be overkill for most applications.
Then there are some of us who could use that much light during our less sane activities. While I haven't been in a cave for many years, I regularly explore old mines. When dropping a shaft for the first time it would be really great to have a feel for just how deep it is and its condition further down.
At this point I'm only about 50 feet down a 250 foot drop.
I'm only about 1/2 down this incline. The speck of light at the top right is my exploring buddy at the top of the incline.
I certainly wouldn't want 750L all the time but it would be nice to have it available.
Joanne
I went camping for a week at Lava Beds National Monument with my wife and kids a few weeks ago, and did some real caving for the first time in my life. The entire place there is honeycombed with old lava tubes. I had a blast actually...
Now that I've done that, I can see why you'd want a super bright light, but not necessarily a headlamp... In sections where I had to go on hands and knees, or belly crawl, the M2 setting on my ST5-190NW was plenty of light. But, in sections where you were walking, or stepping over stones or clambering over boulders and the like, my headlamp gave me bad tunnel vision. I stumbled several times because I couldn't see the texture of the floor of the cave, and so it looked flat to me instead of the highly irregular and broken surface that it actually had.
I solved this problem by angling my Spark up a little higher so it lit up the roof of the cave pretty well, which was very useful as most of the tubes there have ceilings covered in lava-cicles, and they can hurt like a b***h if you bang into one. I put my Zebralight SC50w+ on a lanyard around my wrist and used it as a walking light; the lower angle helped me see the surfaces in the caves much better and I had almost no missteps after that.
I also found that when we came into a big chamber or larger open space, I needed a much throwier light to see into/across the chamber. My Q123^2 XPG-R4 is certainly not a dedicated thrower, but it did well enough for me in that situation that I could see across any chamber we encountered, and down long shafts and the like. And yeah, it would have been nice if it had been something brighter, but my point is that it worked far better for me in my hand in that usage situation than on my head. Head mounting just takes too much important information away that makes a difference in my comfort and safety. So a super bright headlamp is still overkill for me, but I sure would like to go back for another trip there with a new 2x18650 XML handheld light!!!
