Why we believe that Lucifer headlamps will always be better.
1. WE EXTENSIVELY USE OUR LAMPS
We use them, everyday. As we ourselves do orienteering and multisport racing a lot, we know what is crucial, important and put a lot effort to make our lamps the best for all kinds of sports.
Lucifer lamps were designed for sport with all the user experience we have. We designed and manufacture all items piece by piece in our company instead of ordering everything in china or through other companines. They wouldnt put the important added value into the product like we do.
2. WE HAVE DIRECT CONTACT TO ALL CUSTOMERS
At the very beginning, we started selling first headlamps to our friends, people from our outdoor club, promoting on races that we do. From that on many customers successfullyy use them for their demanding racing and competitions and we still personally know many of them. Direct contact to your headlamp manufacturer is a nice thing, if anything goes wrong, you call us and we will resolve your problem and quickly find what went wrong. We know about every single (reported) failure, we know what our customers like or which accessories would they need. This close relationship helped us to reach high reliability and make a great product in short time.
Even now you can send us an email and we reply to all your questions! You get an answer from the person who designed the whole product and know everything about it. Would it be possible with any other headlamp manufacturer?
3. PARAMETERS WE CLAIM ARE REAL
Especially chinese but you would be suprised that even some very known european producers claim higher runtimes than actual. They fools you, what they write is simply not true. Mostly these lights are unregulated, first few minutes shining with declared light ouput but after few hours its 30% or maybe even lower of the original value. It is unfortunately in compliance with ANSI NEMA FL-1, this standard does not differ between regulated and unregulated lights and favors unregulated as they can claim absurd runtimes.
Slowly dimming light overtime is not anything useful. Compare it with any of our lights, all have constant brightness regulation which means they shine still the same from the very beginning to the very end of runtime.
Second parameter very frequently exageratted is luminous output (lumen count). Easily any company can claim unreal number of lumens because no customer can measure it. Its common practice to attract you. You can have high lumens for the first second (until the LED chip is heated) or they just multiply real lumen count by 2 or whatever number. Customer can verify this roughly with a calculator but should have some knowledge and insight into LEDs and batteries.
4. WE FOCUS ON ALL IMPORTANT ASPECTS
You buy the headtorch because you need light - its the basic thing. Lucifer headlamps provides in its size the highest light ouput and longest runtimes. In case you dont need so much light, there are 4 lower modes so everyone find the one for his needs. When you need more runtime choose the appropriate mode. No need to worry it will shut off all of a suddden. Even if you ignore all discharge warnings the light will never let in complete darkness.
Our lamps are also robust, reliable and made completely from aluminium. You need reliability. When something happens in the middle of a long race or in the middle of nowhere, its unpleasent. We are trying hard to make our lights the most reliable, current failure rates are near zero.
We focus on important things and there are actually a lot of them that make together perfect headlamp. Headlamps must have easy uderstandable switching but at the same time provide enough modes for people needs. It must have constant brightness regulation, pleasent beam pattern, good light color and color reproduction, large and soft button with instant feedback that never misses your press. Headlamp must allow large tilting and must be fixed tight in the position you set. All plastics must be strong and do not break in cold. Connectors must survive thousands of connects and disconnects without losing its contact. Cables must withstand wear, bending and longlife operation without conductor break, cables must have glands and grommets in every place they leave the battery or headlamp housing.
Well, what it then unimportant? We find bluetooth connectivity, programming of mode intensities over computer or mobile app, or reactive lighting less important than everything we mentioned in recent paragraphs. That doesn't mean we would never have these things, maybe we would have them sometime later, but its not priority. These features are ice on the cake.
5. START USING 21st CENTURY TECHNOLOGY
Forget all AA and AAA batteries and start using li-ions! They have got just advantages, much higher capacity per weight or volume, high capacity under load, long worry-free life. They are industrially proven and used nowadays not only in laptops, home appliances but also electrovehicles. Take advantage of using them, they are safe and easy to use.
Its LED century, dont be scared using them. When manufacturer choose right color temperature and good color quality you wouldnt want to go back. Remember, only cheap copies uses low cost inefficient LEDs that produce ugly blue tinted light. We use the best 3mm LEDs currently made on earth, XP-L2 LEDs from Cree company. These chips produce very nice natural white light and are efficient as hell.
6. NEW IDEAS AND APPROACHES
We are not in the industry for multiple decades like some other companies, but rather multiple years. Its disadvantage you can maybe say, but it brings also many positives. We started from the really beginning with simple tools and machines and every year we look for new technologies that would help us to make headlamps faster, better, cheaper and easily. Now the time brings unlimited number of new technologies, much more than ever before and we can take advantage of using them. Measuring instruments gets cheaper and more precise than they were. Computer programs helps to do the job quickly, we can even simulate lot of electronic circuits without physically having them. You can sell worldwide just by having e-shop and decent online marketing.
Everything now is unfortunately changing very fast, Im not the big fan of it as its quite demanding to keep up with the pace, but we are trying really hard and probably much better than the companies which have many employees, large organizational structure and long decision processes. We are cost effective, organize our work in close team and work efficiently. Me myself was born in 1984 with the computer from my childhood and I am therefore very open mind when finding the ways how can computer makes my life (job) easier.
Let think of why so many lamps still use plastic bodies (which looks like a aluminium) where the high power LEDs overheat and looses its life and efficiency. Yes, true, good aluminium cnc milled shell is pricey (even in China) but its definitely worthwhile. We never dont dance around trying to cut down every single cent just to make the headlamp the cheapest. Traditional manufacturers do that, they only optimize the costs of a product. Many customers buy them just because they are cheap. We choosed the different approach and mindset, we optimize our headlamps for the best performance achieved with reasonable (adequate) costs. Customers buy our Lucifer headlamps because they need it for their activities or previously bought cheap bad product and dont want to do it again.
Classical economic theory says you cannot make perfect product. In fact, we are graduated economists (University of economics in Prague), but we are trying to make one. Be part of it and have one!
7. WE ARE FLEXIBLE
Still we are small company and that helps us to bring products fast to the market, explore and deploy new LEDs and technologies. When we make a decision we dont need to get it approved by any company manager. We talk about it and then straight away we start working on it. In our workshop we all everything we can do that in quite short time, we have CNC milling machine, injection muolder, lot of soldering stations and accessories or measuring equipement. When we do prototypes of electronics we are able to hand solder everything even on copper boards, reliably and repeatedly. We can then do any prototype changes every week or second week which is awfuly fast.
Thats why we have had first (and for the long time the only) headlamps that use latest XP-L2 LEDs from Cree. I am convinced to think that some manufactures even now didnt notice they are available.
8. OUR WARRANTY IS INTERNATIONAL
We have 3 years international warranty on all our products. How many companies would do the same? Not to mention that our international warranty is not just a false claim but really works. We take care of every one our customers no matter where he is located. Even upgrades or after warranty services are not so much expensive. We can repair everything!
Every product line that we introduced (S,M,L,X) we carry on and bring further and better models mostly backward compatible. We do not cut down the product line because some "marketing or product manager" decides its no more needed. We do not look for few cents saving when it would make bad product from the good one. We always want to make best products no matter what makes our rivals!
9. ENVIROMENTAL POLICY
We pay attention to our enviroment, save resources and do not want to contribute too much to the climate change. We are trying to use as less glues as possible, recycle and regranulate plastic parts during manufacturing. We save water, blank paper or anything else. All our products are made locally with many Czech or european parts. We pay attention that they are carefuly made and serve you years without any flaw. Buy rather one expensive and superb headlamp rather than using multiple mediocre lamps that fails during years!
10. WE LOVE OUR WORK
Its true, we love what we do and every feedback we receive gives us a great deal of motivation to our future work. We have good feeling that our work does make sense, that we are everyday working on something really interesting, pushing on the technology boundaries and our knowledge further down the road. When you trust in your work, you do it with passion. You are doing it precisely and the best not because you take money for living from that, but because you want to. We love our job and do always something extra, its not actually just our job but more a pleasure and mission.