Yet again Petzl have hit the mark with their headtorches. The Tika XP2 is an LED torch that takes three AAA batteries. It is lightweight, with the batteries housed along with the lamp so there is no battery pack at the back of your head.
The elastic headheadstrap is easily adjustable and features a neat little built-in signal whistle, a nice addition.
The main white LED lamp has three outputs, first push of the button gives you maximum mode at 60 lumens, though this maximum output will fade with use as the LED is not regulated. Second push gives you a lower light, about 15 lumens and third push gives you a flashing strobe at maximum output.
Holding down the button switches to a smaller, red colured LED, first up is a steady red light, perfect for night time map reading and preserving your night vision, second press gives you a flashing red. All modes have their place and the steady state lights are augmented by a slide up lens which transforms the beam from spot to wide angle. This is a very handy feature, I wear the Tika when hiking at night and dependent on conditions either the maximum or economy white light with the wide angle lens in place gives me enough ambient light to walk around quite happily, if I need to pick out a distant feature the wide angle lens is flipped down and the spot gives good penetration to maybe a hundred metres.
If I was forced to level at criticism it would be the lumen output of the lamp, I am sure it could be boosted to twice its current level with little to no issue with battery life. Apart from that it is a handy little torch.
Oh, and by the way this does take lithium batteries which is a total godsend, you can load the torch with lithiums and leave it in a backpack out in the cold and it will work fine, try that with alkalines and see how far it gets you!
Nice little torch for the price.