I was quite nervous going into this as I really like Project Farm reviews and the first few lights were very suspicious 
But, Fenix and Wurkkos ended up in his top recommendations which was good to see. He really only focused on testing lumens, intensity, battery capacity, and runtime. Interesting to see what normal people think of flashlights at least 
That was painful to watch. I usually like most of his videos.
Honestly, I like it.
This forum is heavily skewed towards being a flashlights-as-toys community, and is often extremely out of touch with people who want flashlights purely as tools.
If you were to pluck 20 people off the side of Half Dome or the Appalachian Trail, or using headlamps underneath a truck, youâll find surprisingly little in common with the forum.
These people arenât wrong.
His testing probably could have addressed a couple things better, though.
âPeople donât want Âźâin drills. People want Âźâin holes.â
Most people here want the drills. Most normies want the holes.
How many people here were/are soooo interested in which high-current 14500 will give them 10% more lumens, when the visual difference, either side-by-side or a/b, is almost imperceptible? But the extra current will cook the LED and kill runtime.
And the same people will kill light output with a minus-green filter to rosify the beam, because, why not?
Or want a UI that you need a PhD in flashlightology and a cheet-sheet to work the more esoteric functions?
And the thread about making a âgrandma lightâ that granny could pick up and just use, right away people were stuffing all other functions into it. â1 mode is nice. Well, 2 modes for high/low would be better. Nah, granny needs at least 3 modes for it to to be useful. Nah, she needs ramping!â And so on.
Before you know it, granny sets her house on fire because her trembling hands accidentally doubleclicked to turbo, she forgot which morse-code sequence you need to turn off the light, left the light too close to the drapes, then foomf!!, there go the drapesâŚ
Granny was fine for ages with a plastic craplight that took 2 D cells with a hotwire bulb. Now someone gives her a light with a button that she needs to telegraph instructions to, just to turn it on. And then people wonder why that sits in a drawer and she goes back to the 10buk CVS Special.
And there are probably 100Ă as many normies (and grannies) as there are âenthusiastsâ.
The biggest impact I had as far as beam quality? Showing someone 2700K vs 6500K on some woodgrain. I show someone the sad dingy blue-gray âwoodâ under 6500K, then the rich rosy brown wood under 2700K. Not even high-CRI, but an old Cree.
So, it wouldnât surprise me if a headlamp most people here wouldnât even spit on, would get high marks at Project Farm. I havenât watched the video yet, but will, right after this tiradeâŚ
Not sure if I like the original FarmProject review or the @Lightbringerâs pre-rant better. Both excellent 
I have quite a collection of Hanks, Convoys, and FFL. For a while I enjoyed them. But I realized, at my age, Iâm starting to struggle with fine motor control and memory working capacity to choreograph the clicks to operate and configure those lights ⌠for example, disabling aux, post off voltage, floor, steps, is getting hard. And once the temperature drops below 50°F my fingers feel 10 years older, and it becomes even more cumbersome.
UIs just keeps getting more and more complicated, and I am getting older, dumber, and more arthritic âŚ
So I decided, it would just be easier to create my own firmware, than configure, or modify, existing stuff into perpetuity. Too bad Convoy drivers are not programmable, Iâd love to have my own UI on that upcoming B35AM quad.
Once Iâm ready I will share it with the world.
Thatâs why my Acebeam EC50 gen2 is a fave. Not a single blinky. Single click on/off, hold to cycle through like 3 modes. Sideswitch is big and easy to find, a big silver button on a black body, and easy to push like a keyboardâs switch. No shortcuts, nothing âpollutingâ the simple and predictable UI.
Itâs about as close to a granny light as youâd get, aside from, say, a simple on/off sideswitch Maglite.
Hmmm, he didnât measure the drop in lemons when zooming in to The Bat Signal on all those zommies. Other than that, wasnât bad.
Just donât know what to say. AbsurdâŚ
How would you like this kind of interface in a headlamp, then?
I got one for my carsâ wiper speed/delay, so it looks intuitive. Dunno if the wheely-thing qualifies as âgesture controlâ, though. (Ainât following that thread, just saw it nowâŚ)
Still got that Boruit with the on/off swipe control. Nice, but a) gotta close your eyes when swiping it, else your hand 2" right in front of the light will blind you, and b) it sometimes goes on/off accidentally by just coming close enough to something.
Itâs a gesture, just requiring a gentle, fleeting touchâŚ
In contrast to frequently banging the on/off switch, in âMorse Codeâ (brilliant!), to make the light obeying your wishes, may I add.
4hrs to charge HM71R? 
Btw, I just checked HM71R runtime chart from Fenix.
Watch the scales on the axes.
Itâs interesting: on Fenix runtime graphs the axes are definitely non-linear and a little arbitrary. Both of them.
4 hrs to charge the HM71R. I tested it. Forget exact number, but not 4 hrs.
Itâs important to meet people where they are, but itâs also important for mainstream tool reviews to educate the audience about aspects they may not understand. In this case, I think there are aspects the reviewer himself could use some education on. A for effort, but itâs clearly his first time.
Color rendering, for example is an aspect a lot of people realize is really important for their use case as soon as they see the difference side by side. They may have never realized that was something they could comparison shop, but as soon as they see one light makes it easier to spot a dog poop than the other, thatâs the one they want.
I think the review had a bit of a misplaced emphasis on throw; throwy headlamps are niche, and most people will find a tight hotspot on the primary LED wrong for most of their headlamp tasks. It also compared runtime on the highest mode, which punishes lights that maintain their output. Finally, there wasnât much emphasis on weight. The lightest headlamps in the test were 1x18650, and many people consider even that a bit heavy.
He probably did a little bit of research. Unfortunately there are multiple popular testers who insist on doing turbo run times. I contend it doesnât make sense. I donât use a light that way but some people think it matters.
I suspect that some people recommended some of those lights and others he just searched Amazon. I donât know if they were sold in high numbers or just had high lumen number claims. In most of his videos he looks to generate numbers to compare products to each other. He mentioned the torque test channel and he had a famous video about high lumen claims on Amazon lights.
He did not mention anything about the UI of any of the lights. So how are we going to know if Grandma is going to be able to figure out how to operate the light when sheâs under her truck? Ultimately heâs doing what people ask for. This is a tough task to take on. In the end I donât think he is helping anybody choose the âbestâ headlight. There are too many lights. He should have passed on this subject.
Roughly zero people watching this video would trade runtime/brightness for CRI.
That is probably the best example of the weirdness that forms inside internet forum bubbles.
There are a lot of details we flashlight nerds consider important that will never matter to normal people, but Iâm pretty sure seeing in full color is a plus for a majority of humanity. Most people just donât know itâs a thing one headlamp does better than another.
