Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsThe specs listed are deliberately misleading, the math doesn't check out. Also unreliable
Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2023
According to the specs this has a 2,400mah battery. If we generously assume they're using top-of-the-line LED tech, you can produce about 100 lumens per watt. So at 2.4AH * 3.7v for a lithum battery, their battery can theoretically store ~9wh of energy, slightly less than an iPhone battery. The theoretical maximum amount of light that can produce is 500lm for ~2hr, or 300lm ~3hr, or 100lm for ~9hr, etc.
Take Petzl's Actik Core light for example, which has a similar battery and package size to the Storm 500-R: 600lm for 2hr, 100lm for 7hr, 7lm for 100hr, seems very reasonable.
There is no way black diamond can >3x these specs in the same overall volume and weight, it's not physically possible with battery tech today.
And yet... on the 500-R box Black Diamond somehow claims theirs can do 500lm for 7h, 250lm for 19hr, or 6lm for 350h, which would require a battery >21wh, impossible to fit into a headlamp that size. The "ANSI burn time" spec supposedly measures the burn time until 10% of initial output, so they only way they can achieve these numbers is if they *rapidly* drop the brightness from the initial e.g. 250lm down to like 50lm for the majority of the runtime.
Don't support products that blatantly mislead consumers with bogus specifications. The fact that Black Diamond chose to mislead people this much on a headlight makes me question their integrity and think twice about buying climbing gear or anything else safety-critical from them, I cannot fathom why an otherwise reputable company would burn their brand like this.
To top it all off, when I bought this light I played around with it for like 20min and the electronics promptly failed. It got stuck showing one battery status light and became entirely unresponsive (and it wasn't in locked mode or any other mode). I had to wait a week for the battery to die before it seemingly rebooted and started responding to button presses again. The charging port flap is also questionably waterproof, I wouldn't trust it to reliably stay closed on an intense climb or bicycle ride in the rain.