draacor wrote:couple of reasons i didnt consider the zebralight as of yet. I limited myself for now to amazon because of the easy return policy. Zebralights are on there but the choice is limited, they only have the ones with an overhead strap which i wanted to avoid. I also dont see any with a dedicated flood and spot light and red light. I like the idea of a flashlight that can also be used as a headlamp though.
Thanks for the reply!
The overhead strap is standard on the Zebralights with the heavier 18650 battery, and absent on the lighter AA battery models. From my experience, this is a good policy--I don't need the center strap with the lighter battery, but welcome it with the heavier battery. (The lights themselves weigh so little that the battery is the main contributor of weight.)
Zebralights come in either spot, flood, or "floody" (somewhere between spot and flood). I've tried all three; floody works best for my field of vision. With spot, I get frustrated at not being able to see outside the narrow beam, and with flood, I get annoyed at my light signature being bigger than my field of view (I dislike lighting up dark wilderness more than necessary). Floody just fills my field of view, with little or no extra spill.
Zebra's are simple, so no model that I know of has a switchable diffuser, nor switchable colors. This simplicity appeals to me. I don't mind carrying more than one light--in fact, as said earlier, I insist upon it if being without a light would be dangerous. These lights are small enough that I don't mind having two or three in various pockets, my camera bag, or in my pack.
Others will of course have other preferences. Fenix makes a good light, but the models I've handled are less simple and more fiddly than Zebras.
When I did a night rim-to-rim crossing of the Grand Canyon, I carried two AA Zebralights (with batteries) plus two spare batteries. I ended up using neither, as I did the walk by starlight and tapping the ground with my foot to tell where the drop-offs were. But it was good piece of mind knowing that two bombproof lights were within reach.
Mar 12, 2026 at 10:49 PM
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