My favorite autodark welding hood was my first one. An el cheapo Harbor Freight a buddy gave me as a gift for fixing his boat trailer for him many years ago. I loved it. Seemed I could dial it in for anything. Even welding indoors under artifficial light. I also liked it for welding thin stuff like pickup beds. It went from dark to light fast enough I could see the glow diminish on the weld puddle and I could quickly stack welds without over heating the metal. To me it looked a lot like that stack of dimes I hear TIG guys talk about. When the HF hood died I was of course in the middle of a job. Imagine my consternation when I found out the batteries were not replaceable. I bought another HF hood. The more expensive of the two they sold at the time and I hated it. Oh, it worked ok if I was wallowing away at a couple pieces of metal, but for welding sheet it was carp. The weld would almost cold by the time it went clear making it a slow and tedious job to weld thin stuff. YUCK! When it died I didn't bother to replace the batteries in it. I threw it away, and bought a Lincoln. The Lincoln wasn't as bad as HF #2 or as good as HF #1, but it was ok until I dropped it. The shade adjustment knob broke off. It seems to be stuck on or near the darkest shade. Well, that sucks. I can see the arc, but not much of anything else when I'm welding. I can make do if I can drag the assembly out into the sun, but just barely. If I have to weld indoors all I can see is the arc. YUCK! I had to weld some casters and caster mounts onto a machine stand yesterday so I could easily move out of my machine room. You can't get much more indoors than that. It would have been a dead easy job with my autodark. Just hold the mount in place and tack it. Unfortunately I could not see shit with it. I wound up having to clamp up on all four mounts one a a time and use my regular shield since its not as dark as the auto dark. Yes I tried sticking a screw driver in the hole left by the missing knob. It feels like you can adjust it, but nothing changes.
So. I am in the search for a new auto dark. I don't weld all the time and I am absolutely not a fan boy of any brand so I am not going to just throw money at it. I want one with a knob that won't break if it gets bumped or dropped. That can go clear fast after the arc stops, and has a good adjustment range for indoor and outdoor welding. I asked about this once before and somebody suggested one of the guys like HTP or something like that , but I don't recall for sure.