Hi guys,
Yesterday I ordered (online from MEC, a retailer here in Canada) the newly re-designed basic Petzl Tikka headlamp (advertised as becoming available in January 2017) and it would seem to be a good deal. Three levels of power, with the maximum a decent 200 lumens (double the previous model) plus stealthy red. With respectable run times, and the red has a strobe feature ...
I don't know how to post photos, but there's a photo in this press blurb.
https://www.petzl.com/CA/en/Sport/New/TIKKA#.WGcCY7EZOis
That is a lot of name-brand bang-for-the-buck. I found one recent YouTube video about it, and the "tester" (obviously down in the U.S.) who received the new 2017 as a "test-sample" said that the U.S. price would be $30 ... the same as the previous model. Which pleased him immensely ...
Happy New Year!
EDIT: January 6 - So the headlamp arrived at the Post Office on January 3rd, and it is even better than I could have hoped. I was sceptical that the single red LED would be (as advertised) visible at night at hundreds of meters on strobe, but it is! A great safety feature. (I have real/dedicated strobes ... a Princeton Tec on my PFD and a mil-spec ACR strobe in my car and boat) that are obviously more powerful, but the tiny Petzl is pretty damn good, and always with you.
The extraordinary-long white-light advertised "run-time" on 3 AAA batteries (60 hours at 100 lumen middle-power) remains to be seen, but I suspect that I will not be disappointed. They actually claim that it will run the same 60 hours on full-tilt 200 lumen ... but there
has to be a typo in there I think.
EDIT: Aha! I just learned that this Classic model is unregulated, which would explain the identical run times for both high and medium. Kinda like a horse race between two perfectly matched horses ... one explodes out the gate and is balls to the wall for the first 200 m, and the other gets a more moderate start. By the end of the back stretch they are nose-and-nose with about equal amounts of gas in the tank. It ends in a photo finish.
A huge deal from a respected manufacturer for $30 ... $38 in Canada. I just bought a second one.