I've been tinkering around with some lights lately testing run times and usability for my kits. Not just for me, few friends want me to make kits for them for various outdoors sports. Came to some conclusions I should have picked up on a while ago.

No one will use a headlamp unless it's a survival situation with no other people around.
Photon Freedoms should be standard-issue. Not for the military, as in, you're born, the doctor says what gender you are and sticks a Freedom in your hand.
Some monochrome LEDs might be greatly underrated for emergency use.
Far too many people think those knock-off Shakelights actually work.

A few months ago I bought a yellow-beam Photon for the heck of it. Used it a couple times to look at the beam, kept it in a pack. Two days ago I decided to test the runtime on Photons using 2032s. I threw both the fresh-cell yellow and a heavily worn out red one I've been using for a year in a Pelican case, wrote down the hour and minute they were turned on, and left them alone. Two days later as of tonight at 7:30, the already half-brightness red will still turn on when clicked and fade away gradually as the cell wears down. Not enough to use it for anything, but after near daily use for a year, two days of light is still something.
The yellow is still at full brightness, with good enough projection to move around at night, inside the case it makes a yellow lantern effect in a dark room.

Forty eight hours without dimming...In a long-term lock-in situation, that's amazing for a coin cell. Spacing at six hours a night for hiking somewhere or twelve hours of darkness for an all-nighter, this test portion alone would keep you going between four and eight days. I've heard the 120 hour mark bounced around about the 2032 cells, I'm starting to believe that. For a full-sized light it'd be something, for a hardcore piece of jewelry like a Photon it's unheard of.

Mr. Ritter making the ETS Freedom was what got me into them in the first place, if they ever switch to these newly announced brighter LEDs I'd give a few as gifts. I'm pretty sure from another forum the new LEDs are being added in without changing the packaging, not sure if they're sprint-runs or are constantly produced and would be upgraded.

And now, headlamps...I'm rather proud of my green Tikka Plus with Adapt system, recommending the high quality but bare-bones Princeton Tec Aurora to the people asking me about kits and general outdoors work. Or at the very least for the indoors types, the Energizer cheapies from Target. Not one person has readily accepted keeping around a headlamp in a kit, a pack, a car, or even a house in one case. If an episode of 24 came out with Jack wearing a headlamp all the time, society would turn on its heels as it usually does with celebrities and gadgets, but for now they're just another obscure device of embarrassment.

The same people I tried talking into owning, not flaunting a headlamp mostly swore by those imitations of 'shake-lights'. Walgreens sells a knock-off for five bucks with plain, printless packaging that probably comes off the back of a truck. I can see the coin cells right through the clear case, yet they insist on the shaking motion as a necessity. All it takes is one infomercial.

Currently planning a full-scale, documented test of the various LED colors of Photons using 2032 cells, everything from white to purple set to run until they bust in a tamper-proof case possibly in a chilled environment to mix things up a bit. If the topic ever comes up again I will keep a chart around of the tested run times using cells from the same pack. From there, field testing of the long-runners to figure out what is usable and what isn't. I'm sure red will triumph, but red lights by nature are so dim the military trusted them not to be noticed from a distance. I'm looking for longest running color that can actually be used.