Yeah, Yucca Patrol has a good point.
The best light for you is going to depend to some extent on where you're caving. The lava caves I tend to spend time in have fewer large spaces and far more close and mid-distance conditions.
I've been iterating through a handful of custom lights, currently using something a 3 LED setup that's ugly as sin but provides the right options for me, namely, efficient, plenty of flood, pretty dim most of the time, with a switch for better brightness/throw if I need it. I don't cave with idiots who bring too much light and then whine about it the whole time - we let our eyes get dark adjusted and then run our lights dim. It works out to a similar effect in the end. I mount the batteries on the helmet since it doesn't need a monster pack to keep it fed.
Of course, this only works if your whole party realizes that dim is similar to bright, and it isn't the right approach for caves that consist primarily of huge caverns.
If you have the money, spend it on one of the linked lights earlier in the thread designed for caving. They're really nice, and you avoid the durability and reliability problems that plague most other solutions.
The best light for you is going to depend to some extent on where you're caving. The lava caves I tend to spend time in have fewer large spaces and far more close and mid-distance conditions.
I've been iterating through a handful of custom lights, currently using something a 3 LED setup that's ugly as sin but provides the right options for me, namely, efficient, plenty of flood, pretty dim most of the time, with a switch for better brightness/throw if I need it. I don't cave with idiots who bring too much light and then whine about it the whole time - we let our eyes get dark adjusted and then run our lights dim. It works out to a similar effect in the end. I mount the batteries on the helmet since it doesn't need a monster pack to keep it fed.
Of course, this only works if your whole party realizes that dim is similar to bright, and it isn't the right approach for caves that consist primarily of huge caverns.
If you have the money, spend it on one of the linked lights earlier in the thread designed for caving. They're really nice, and you avoid the durability and reliability problems that plague most other solutions.