Alpkit Lampray Light
11th Jul 2017
LEDs are well and truly immersed into the lighting market now so it is no surprise that Alpkit have done what they usually do - take a look at the other stuff out there and design something that combines the best of the rest to make a really nice piece of kit. The Lampray is the size of a small apple. It is domed on one side to allow a good distribution of light, and is flat on the other so it doesn't roll away when put down.
First and foremost it is bright. Hang this in your tent or under your tarp and it properly lights what's below in a uniform bright white light. If you don't need full brightness (it's way brighter than you need to read in your tent for example) you can turn it down from 196 Lumen to 10 Lumen (with a mid setting of 100 Lumen). There's also a strobe function. Operation is via a recessed button on the flat surface. There are a series of small bluer LED indicator lights to let you know how much charge it has. These light up initially, then go out once you have assessed the power so as not to waste more charge.
Hanging it is simple thanks to a decent sized fold-away clip / hook, but it also cunningly has a magnet inside it so you can very easily attach it to a car, a metal beam or any other magnetic flat surface.
In terms of it's power it has an internal rechargeable battery, charged via USB. The battery capacity is 3,300 mAH (that's roughly twice an iPhone 5s battery) which gives advertised burn times of 8 hours, 12 hours and 110 hours. In reality we found them to be more like half of this which is still reasonable in my book. One more little feature is a second USB socket which allows you to use the thing to give your phone a boost-charge. It takes 5 hours to re-charge. Oh, did I say that it is also water resistant?
It retails at £35 (but is currently on offer at £29 at the time of writing). You can buy it at Alpkit.