Petzl NAO - high-tech headlamp review.

[Incahoots]

Nice review, Thank you!

 

[the badger]

Great review! I bought a Nao back in mid Oct and love it. Sure it has it's flaws (namely the fog issue discussed above and also when breathing), but that stuff is expected from a first generation product. I'm not quite sure how Petzl and others will rectify the reactive/fog issue, but it sure would be nice if the sensor could detect that you are in a foggy/humid environment, and compensate for it. Things to look forward to I guess..

 

[USAMisix]

Great post about this product! I wish I had seen it when I was doing my initial research. I do photography, outdoor concerts etc and this comes in really handy when breaking down my gear after a show when there is no power in the field. I got a Petz NAO headlamp also for a friend of mine and they loved it. When I was doing research I found this place linked here..... first post link removed.... that was really great about talking with me more on the product before making my purchase. They have great customer support, check them out! I can't say enough good things about the headlamp. I am so paranoid about leaving my photo gear behind that trying to see in the dark makes having one of these a pure pleasure.Ty

 

[AnAppleSnail]

The air force detects fog (contrails) with a laser. On the ground you'd need a different system: if an offset laser looks like a point to a sensor, no fog. If it looks like a smear or a line, there's fog.

 

[johnny0000]

Fantastic review as always. Great reading. Thank you

 

[beamon]

My NAO have a pretty nice tint of light, but the manufacturer does not claim to use selected LED's, so as usual it may depend on the series.

Thanks for this fine review. I'm very interested in the Nao, but I'm hesitant only because I wonder if the nice, less-bluish tint shown in this review is the same tint emitted by all Naos. Can anyone confirm this? I'd rather get a headlamp that doesn't have a harsh blue "cool white" tint.

 

[jmm244]

...I wonder if the nice, less-bluish tint shown in this review is the same tint emitted by all Naos. Can anyone confirm this?...

The tint of my NAO also appears similar to to the shots in the review, quite pleasant. I too was concerned about the possibility of receiving something with a tint as blue as Petzl is known for in lights like their TIKKINA (2), and was quite relieved to receive a NAO with a more neutral tint (they seem to be doing better in their newer/higher end lights).

 

[Ggmesquita]

I have a NAO and I liked it so much, I gave one to my dad. I did compare the tints and I there is a difference. Mine looks more like the photos of the review. While his has a slightly green tint to it. They were bought about 3 months apart.

 

[beamon]

Thank you, jmm244 and Ggmesquita, for your responses. I'm relieved! I'm now just waiting for a good sale on the Nao.

 

[HistoryChannel]

Thanks for the review... I just got the Petzl Nao and I am already frustrated that Petzl did not just use a standard battery case so we can slide in an 18650 of our choosing... They could have EASILY put that 100KOhm NTC thermistor in the battery case and not attached to their battery. Sure it might get rid of the AAA emergency battery option, but they could easily sell a battery shell with no 18650 in it as a spare for AAA emergencies.

Now I am looking to immediately upgrade the OEM battery to an AW18650 3400mAH. But I will be trying to figure out a way to move the electronics to the small space in the battery case, and using standard metal prongs so I can easily slide in and out the 18650 battery. This way, I can charge my batteries using my Xtar charger with good cc/cv algorithm. Plus it will be easy to bring a bunch of charged 18650's to swap out with when needed rather than trying to carefully pull out theMolex 5264-3P connector.

The headlamp itself is awesome!!!!! LOVE IT, hate their proprietary battery setup.... grrrrrr!!!!!

 

[TSellers]

The headlamp itself is awesome!!!!! LOVE IT

Would be great to hear exactly why it's awesome. And I don't mean this in a disparaging way, as when I was evaluating it in no way struck me as having enough redeeming features to overcome the many downsides to it's trendy design. So I'd like to hear about what I overlooked so I won't be so blind next time I'm evaluating a new product. What I'd like to see but have not found so far is a documentation of features this light offers that makes it surpass the other more affordable offerings that are on the landscape? So far all I've been able to dig up are seat of the pants impressions of the light which unto themselves are valuable as first impressions, but I'd like to hear from someone that has ridden it hard and put it away wet.

 

[HistoryChannel]

Well I'm an avid hiker and go canyoneering often. I just went on an overnight hike up to Telegraph Peak in Cucamonga Wilderness in SBNF, CA. 9000 ft and snowing pretty hard too. I specifically went up to test out the BioLite Stove I just got.

I've been hiking since I was in Boy Scouts and know what looks good on paper isn't necessarily how it performs in the real world. Everything I have picked for gear was tested and abused and survived. Wen hiking I take into consideration size, weight, ruggedness and performance.

The Nao will get a full workout tomorrow so yes it will come back frozen, wet and beat up. I have all the permits already (Wilderness Permit, Fire permit, fuel wood permit, etc) so I'm set to go tomorrow. I plan on taking the Nao up to around 10,000 ft in freezing temps, most likely will be snowing at the time also. ( I'll see how the reactive lighting works with the reflection off falling snow).

Initially, I think the Nao is awesome for its programmable features. This is what sets the Nao apart from other headlamps in my opinion. I love that you can customize and live "test" the setting, meaning the light will fire up as you program the profile so you can see what the setting does.

Being able to set output levels even for constant mode, up to 5 levels 0-100% output each level in 1% increments and being able to see a runtime estimate for each output level selected is a huge plus. And you get 3 personal slots. Example: slot 2 you can have the constant set at 5% / 15% / 30% / 70% / 100%... And have different settings for 2 more profiles.

The Multi-activity seems standard and has to stay in slot 1. Slots 2-4 is customizable with each profile being able to handle 5 levels of reactive and constant each. This, this means I can have a profile for hiking and when I come up against a boulder I have to climb, I can switch my rock climbing profile.

The head strap is secure and comfortable. More comfortable that some other headlamps I have. Being rechargeable is a plus (even with the 2300 mAH 18650 it comes with).

Is it expensive? Yes.... It's would be much better at around $149.99. But when I get the battery pack modded with the AW 18650 3400 mAH, I think this will be my #1 go to headlamp. It will take many real world testing and tweaking of the custom profiles I have made, but when the profiles are dialed in to my personal satisfaction... I think this will be an excellent headlamp added to my collection.

This is not a headlamp for the casual user. But geared toward those who like to tweak with the output settings.

 

[HistoryChannel]

I'd like to hear from someone that has ridden it hard and put it away wet.

Ok, here you go. I took the Nao up with me to test it out. I typed up my thoughts...

For those who want a visual on what the Reactive lighting is: http://youtu.be/FZb3k_x067w

My real world testing of the Petzl Nao, and quick thoughts on the Fenix PD32UE tested on a real deep wilderness hiking trip.

Location and conditions for real world use test:
Cucamonga Wilderness, San Bernardino National Forest (SBNF), CA
Entry point was at the Middle Fork Trailhead 6W01 (3,983 ft and light snow dusting on ground) using the upper trail past Third Stream Crossing (5,600 ft, 2-4" of snow) to Icehouse Saddle (7,600 ft). From there I headed North to Telegraph Peak (8,985 ft, 6-10" of snow). Getting to Telegraph peak was done in daylight, and coming back was after sunset. Weather conditions ranged from 41 degrees at the Middle Fork Trailhead to 19 degrees at Telegraph Peak after sunset. Some stream hopping and heavy foliage and huge boulder climbing/descending was necessary.

I'll skip right to the part where I started testing the lights.

The Fenix PD32UE puts out a WALL of light. I do not doubt the specs pushing 740 lumens. It was a wide spot so it did not penetrate very far in the pitch dark wilderness. But closer range it just completely lit up the area. It is (in my opinion) an average performing light for hiking good as a secondary unit. Mainly due to the side switch. The placement of the side switch (mode switching) is exactly where my pinky or palm falls when using gloves. And sometimes I would hit the switch accidentally switching modes unintentionally. The 2 raised sided around the tailcap is annoying and made it harder to use with gloves. It was hard to sense where the raised spots were and could not reliably push the button. Also, the 3 minutes on Burst mode was annoying as I surveyed the area and/or looked for eye shine for longer than this sometimes and would kick down to a lower level. Also, the 30 minutes or so on Turbo limit makes it pretty much a 3 level light with limited Turbo/Burst use. This is not my first choice for deep woods hiking. Great EDC light though. Performed flawlessly being dunked in the ice cold stream and thrown around in snow.

Petzl Nao:
It started getting dark right around 6:00 PM, (the Mountains and heavy trees cover the sun losing light earlier than in the city.I put on my Nao right around 6:15 and turned it on. I programmed the light using the Petzl Provided "Hiking" profile and tweaked it a bit. In reactive mode, I have it set for 5 levels of lighting ranging from 15% flood to 100% spot/40% flood. The Reactive mode performed very well, staying at level 1 most of the time I was cooking up my meal before heading down. The deep woods do play mind tricks on you with strange noises and unidentifiable animal sounds, so I kept looking up and around the area. The levels changed fast and reliably, as I scanned around for any eye shine to worry about since the Ranger I spoke with before heading out said his truck was chased by a Mtn Lion a few days prior.

This is where the reactive mode really helped, because normally I would flip through the different modes frequently. Having the handsfree option was nice. Also, I had 3 profiles stored in the headlamp and was able to switch from very low light profile to max output profile easily when I needed to. For example, when I was out collecting dry firewood I would have it on Reactive on a high profile I had programmed for doing tasks such as this. Then when I returned to my little area I switched to a low output profile except for Level 5 which I had set at 100% spot in case I looked up to see far.

When I needed to climb over some boulders and navigate through heavy foliage, I set it to my low light hiking profile because I didn't want to be accidentally blinded by 350+ lumens bouncing back at me.

Here are my thoughts on some pros and cons after taking it out for half a day, half of which was in pitch darkness in deep woods, sometimes away from any sort of trails.

Pros:
-User programable light levels from 1%-100%. This is the #1 feature in my opinion because one person's opinion of "low" is different from another. One person might want 5 lumens for low while another might want 10 lumens, etc. With other Headlamps I have used, you get what the company provides you. so if low is set at 15 lumens, med at 60 lumens and high at 200 lumens... its what you get and have to live with. So if you want specific programmability for output levels, this is the headlight for you.

-Reactive lighting. Yes, it worked very well. Better than I expected. As I hiked the trail, and looked down at my feet, it triggered level 1 which I had set at 20% flood only. Then as I looked up the light recognized this and progressively went to Level 2,3,4, and finally 5 which I had set at 100% spot and 40% flood. Level switching was very smooth and ramped up and down rather than an abrupt switch as I navigated through heavy forest landscape.

-Water Resistant. I wouldn't use this under water, but the rubber gaskets kept the moisture out. I did dunk it in the stream and drop it in snow. a quick wipe down and it worked fine. This will survive in rain and splashing conditions.

-Head strap. The 2 bungees on both sides actually work better than my band type head strap. Especially when it got wet, I felt the effects less. It was comfortable to wear for my 4 hour hike through and out of the wilderness.

-Battery Life in Reactive mode. Battery life totally depends on your programming of levels and light intensities at those levels. At 100% output, this is rated at just over an hour of runtime. After 4 hours of real world use in rugged terrain, the indicator showed 2 bars out of 3 lit so runtime is excellent. With the right programming, you can achieve 12+ hours of reactive lighting or a little over an hour depending on your needs.

-Live runtime estimates and test feature for the programming software. You can program and set levels while watching the estimated runtime estimate adjust based on your programming. And you can hit "Test" and the light will fire up at the level you are setting. At any time you can move the Spot and Flood intensity setting and the Nao will respond accordingly live so you can see the light produced at that current setting. Very nice feature. I played with it and tweaked the Flood/Spot mixture til I got the settings I liked.

-Switch. I wore Camelbak's cold weather gloves and I was easily able to operate the switch. Switching between Reactive levels and Constant and profiles is simple.

Cons:
-Power design. Well this thing uses a 18650 Li-ion battery, but in a proprietary "Petzl" setup. It would have been ideal for the end user if Petzl would have placed the necessary small electronics to the battery case so the 18650 could be popped in and out easily. With some gutting and soldering and shrink wrapping, a savvy user can upgrade this battery. But the point is we shouldn't have to do all that. As it stands, if you do not want to mess with anything, you will have to buy $50 spare battery units and you only get 2300 mAh, frustrating when there are better 3400 mAh choices out there.

-Price. At $175 retail, this is expensive for a headlamp. I would like to see 2 versions of this, one as is for a little less, maybe $149.99 would make it more competitive and another version without the reactive feature but keeping the programmable profiles/ output levels reducing the price even further for those that do not need or want reactive lighting.

-Heavy fog interferes with the reactive sensor. I don't know if this is really a "con" because it's not the fault of the headlamp. But it did do some funky level changes while I hiked through some heavy fog. Also, even without fog, the moisture from my breath would flicker the light as it passed over the sensor. Again, I don't know if there is anything Petzl could do to fix this, it is just the nature of how the reactive mode works...

Overall, after using it this will be my #1 headlamp for night hiking due to the #1. Programmable Profiles and #2. Reactive lighting reducing the need to manually adjust to almost never. In some situations, I'd say about 10% of the time, I did manually adjust Spot/Flood/Lighting output. This is not for everyone as there are very nice alternatives. So this can be summarized by saying that the Petzl Nao sets itself apart from its competition by being programmable and having Reactive lighting.

My trusty Subaru got me to there and back..... never have needed chains

 

[TSellers]

Thanks for that comprehensive review. Tonight as I descended from 2200M to 1700M, all of it in the dark, I was thinking about the subject of light levels. For what I was doing I use a flood on my hip belt on high (Spark SD6-NW), and a spot on my head (Spark ST-6 NW), also on high. That's where they stayed the whole time except for a couple of Turbo mode bursts: Turbo spot where it got steeper crossing an avalanche path, and you want to move quickly, and Turbo Flood crossing some icy spots and you want to move carefully. For that sort of activity the flood/spot combination are a real bonus, as are the 34000mAh Panasonic cells, which after about 2 hrs of use still read 3.9v when I got home. So in these circumstances the ability to sustain high mode for the longest possible time became the priority and everything went well. While reactive lighting would not be required, the NW tint with the snow is a must. Did not have the same luck with the Garmin Forerunner 410 however, it's battery barely made it, and the GPS could not deal with course reversals on tight switchbacks very well. This time of year hard to evaluate the headband fit, as winter headgear seems to mitigate it anyway. BTW, at night cougars usually attack from behind, the best defence is watching for tracks rather than eye-shine so if something does jump on your back your can of pepper spray is already poised to deploy over your shoulder (our researchers used to wear Saddam Hussein masks on the back of their heads when doing cougar transects, a trick apparently learned from African Game Wardens). The first Grizzly sighting was last week in our neck of the woods, or rather more accurate to say in our neck of the railroad tracks, where he was seen patrolling for spilt grain on the tracks.

 

[HistoryChannel]

I did have a can of 10.2oz pepper spray on a chest holster and a sidearm for this hike, I was thinking the same as you.... a Mtn Lion would attack from the rear. So I would pull a crazy Ivan and just suddenly stop every so often and just listen, then I spotlighted around behind me for any eyeshine. And I did read somewhere that wearing a mask on the back of your head confuses and deters stalking animals.

And my NiMH Duracells failed in my Garmin Foretrex due to the cold and had to replace it with my Lithium AAA backup I brought luckily.

I did fail to mention the tint of the Nao was way too cool and accurate color rendition was not possible.

Have you ever seen a bear in the wild before? I would love to see one!!! Here in CA, there are approximately 25,000-30,000 bears but mostly in the northern areas of the state.

 

[TSellers]

Never heard of a cougar chasing a vehicle before, wonder if the Ranger mistook the neighbour's large tom cat that was chasing the can of Tuna he had thrown in the box there after he had his lunch. There are about a dozen habituated Grizzlies on the landscape in our field unit so they are pretty much spotted on a daily basis, they can be easily found via telemetry because their GPS collars upload every 30 minutes. The stats are starting to show there is a greater chance of surviving a contact charge with pepper spray than a firearm. I personally doubt that mask on the back of the head theory would work with cats, but who knows? (At that time the researchers just had two mask choices they could buy locally, and they thought Saddam would work better than George Bush. They must have been right, as they are all still alive almost 20 years later.)

It will be interesting to see if the reactive lighting concept will take hold, but as you say they have shot themselves in the foot with that proprietary battery pack, too bad they have not learned from the opensource community. For Search and Rescue work the tint is pretty important, especially for assessing patient cyanosis and cap refill status after they have been dug from avalanche debris. However I was thinking that maybe that's where the Nao would outshine the competition (pun intended). Get buried in an avalanche with my Spark on Turbo mode, hands pinned by my sides, and they dig me up with my brain fried like an egg after the lamp overheats insulated by all the snow. At least the Nao would not fry your forehead and give you more prolonged light to read by as you waited for your rescuers to find you.

 

[rojos]

Thanks for the review and the sweet photos.

 

[jmm244]

...-Head strap. The 2 bungees on both sides actually work better than my band type head strap. Especially when it got wet, I felt the effects less. It was comfortable to wear for my 4 hour hike through and out of the wilderness

I'm curious about what you were wearing under the NAO? You mentioned that it got to ~19 degrees after dark so I assume you didn't have on ultra thick headgear.

I've had my NAO out in the single digits with some pretty bulky headgear on (soft/layered), and with my 7 5/8" head the front tensioning straps reached the limit of their stretch and things got a bit uncomfortable (and forget about getting it on over any kind of adult sized helmet, regardless of what they show in the promotional video). I'm going to order another headband and try replacing the non stretchable paracord like rear portion of the harness with something longer/adjustable.

With this model/type of light being new, I'm sure some of the downsides will eventually be addressed by Petzl, modders or other manufacturers but I'm not waiting. I'm old, and a lot of my friends have already died while holding out for next generation technology to address some perceived product shortcoming. I'm going to enjoy my NAO now, and if someone offers an improved variant in the future, I'll buy that too, if I'm still around.

We only have black bears and imaginary mountain lions in western New York where I live, but I once got chased by a mangy (rabid?) opossum while out on snowshoes. That was a freaky experience, but it occurred back in the days when we carried Maglites, so I could have always thrown it at him as a last resort (there's another thing the NAO isn't good for).

 

[HistoryChannel]

I had on a beanie. It fit ok over the beanie. I can see it not working on some helmets. And I encountered many opossum and they are aggressive as all heck.

 

[carrot]

Hey HistoryChannel, I'd sure like to see some bigger versions of those panoramas you teased us with above.

On the subject of the NAO I haven't been able to test mine out that much so far since I only recently got one but I'm pretty impressed. I think it's quite neat how the two LEDs can combine their power in different amounts, almost creating the appearance of a single beam that has some focusability.

One thing I will note is that the NAO seems a little confused in Reactive mode in winter when you breathe out and it sees the condensation in your breath, as the puffs of condensation temporarily increase the light reflected back to the sensor.

I'm really looking forward to Petzl's next generation of reactive headlamp, the Tikka RXP, which will be more compact and hopefully a sorts of NAO 2.0.