It’s kind of nicely finished and the light output isn’t bad for a little 3-LED jobbie (mine is the old 15 lumens model).

But realistically……the switch is one of the worst I’ve come across. It’s appallingly positioned (put your hand up in the dark and you automatically feel around the main barrel before, if you’re lucky, locating the switch on the slippery and tapering plastic towards the front of the unit. Very poor, and virtually impossible to use with gloved hands. It’s also tactitly inert with virtually no positive feel at all. I’ve had plenty of cheap chinese headlamps with far superior switches.

The battery door looks like a disaster just waiting to happen. I can just see the plastic snapping off the catch or that dinky pin hinge throwing in the towel. It looks very weak.

And I wouldn’t want to drop this thing off the kitchen table if I could help it. I’ve dropped a Petzl MyoXP 30m down a cave shaft and picked it up and just carried on. The plastics on the Fuel look really brittle and the slippery, shiny finish is really not very friendly to cold hands in the outdoors.

I believe Princeton Tec make some very good headlamps, and they have a strong reputation for customer care (at least if you live in the US). But stories also abound of cheap and cracking plastics on their Apex headlamp, so I do question their choice of materials and manufacturing finish.

In summary, the Fuel is a nice piece of desktop design, with a neat look about it and adequate light levels. But in my opinion it never got properly product tested for REAL LIFE use. It’s a ship spoiled for a halfpence of tar.

If you can get one cheap it’s probably worth having. But if I was going high and wanted usability and dependability, I’d look at Princeton’s Quad model, or more likely a Petzl.