UKC

To avoid benightment and bewilderment in the hills, here follows a couple of useful links and a round up of a few headtorches available this Autumn/Winter. They are priced from £12.50 including P&P to £85, along with handy accessories: the Petzl CORE rechargeable battery and the Mammut Ambient Light headtorch light diffuser.

Read more at http://www.ukclimbing.com/gear/news.php?id=4194

In reply to UKC Gear:

It has to be said that the pre-eminent outdoor brands, such as Petzl and Black Diamonds offerings are well and truely lagging the field at thier respective price points against other manufactures. Where you can get improved specs in terms of waterproofness (IPX8), greater range or endurance (and in some cases all three).

In reply to UKC Gear:
Would have been nice if the same info had been given for each product so we could make a valid comparison.

Example - One says it has a maximum range of 110m, another says it has an output of 50 lumens, etc
I have no idea which of these is better.

I appreciate the info is probably straight from the different manufacturers websites, but if doing a cross brand comparison, then need to compare apples with apples.

In reply to steelbru:

We do have an actual headtorch review planned which will look at lumens, candela, lux etc

Meanwhile check this out: http://www.alpkit.com/colab/notes/torch-testing

atb

Mick

In reply to ScraggyGoat: Agreed. As well as better specs, you can also expect lower prices from other manufacturers.

It would be nice if UKC "Product News" items included disclosure about whether the manufacturers of the products covered were paying advertisers.

Everyone realises that advertisers mean that the site is sustainable (and if they're sensible they should be thankful for it), but it would be more ethical in my opinion if the provenance of these "infomercials" was made clearer.

"Gear News at UKClimbing.com present climbing and mountaineering equipment that will be of interest to UKClimbing.com's readers. They are not gear reviews. If you have experience of these products registered users at UKClimbing.com are welcome to add comments to the discussion thread." is a bit mealy mouthed.

In reply to iksander:

It is a fair point about that text - we should look at making it a bit clearer.

All Product News is from paying advertisers and the copy for Product News items is mostly supplied by the advertisers. There may be historical Product News items from companies that aren't advertisers, by you can pretty well assume that everything on the left-hand side of this page http://www.ukclimbing.com/gear/ with a Blue Header is Product News paid for by advertisers. The right-hand side of the page is our UKC-sourced Gear Reviews.

For example this is a comparison Product News with manufacturer information:
http://www.ukclimbing.com/gear/news.php?id=4194

... and this is a comparison Gear Review with a bunch of products which have been reviewed:
http://www.ukclimbing.com/gear/review.php?id=3625

The latter takes us a lot more work.

I realise that this may not be a totally clear distinction for the user so it is something we should look at, however it is difficult to avoid a certain amount of advertorial ambiguity. This is not a problem unique to web sites though since magazines and newspaper have had the same problem for years.

Thanks for your feedback.

Alan

In reply to Mick Ryan - Senior Editor - UKC:


Is this the UKC equivalent of product placement?!

In reply to UKC Gear: It would be good if any description of headtorches included whether they can be used with winter gloves. Almost none can and it is as if manufacturers have never actually used their products in the real world (ie at night and therefore cold).

In reply to m0unt41n:

I've got a BD icon and a Silva Ninox, both of which are perfectly usable with big gloves. What do you want - a bathroom pull cord?