[idickers]

I had my helmet shoot-out, and the winner was the Optrel e684. It was just so much easier to see the puddle and the base metal. I haven't been able to clearly see the bead trailing the arc for some years now, and with the e684 I could see it again, and that gave me more control. The color in the e684 is very neutral, which made it easier to see the different shades of the puddle. The Jackson BH3 was a close second, I could see the puddle much better than my old Miller Elite, it just wasn't as clear as the e684. Plus, the Optrel just felt like it was made better, and the auto-adjusting auto-dark feature is pretty addictive. I didn't care for the Viking, it was darker than the Jackson and the puddle was harder to distinguish from the base metal. Still better than my Miller, just not as obvious for my eyes as the e684. The Optrel 2.5 Vegaview was awesome with the off-state bright vision, but the optics weren't as good for my eyes under the arc. I called the Optrel distributor about this, because I really liked the bright vision the Vegaview had (it would be fantastic when crawling under the dash to weld a roll cage), but they said they could not put the higher-res optics of the e684 in the Vegaview because they could not jump from the 2.5 shade of the Vegaview to shade 13 when the arc starts. Whereas the e684 jumps from shade 4 to 13. Optrel also sent me some blue tinted interior lens covers to try with the e684. While they did shift the color, I didn't think they made it much easier to see than the untinted view.
So there you have it. I'm sure with young eyes it doesn't matter as much, but for my older color-blind eyes there was a world of difference. My beads were immediately better once I could see, and the the LWS made me a great deal on the e684, so it was an easy decision.