Black Diamond Spot Headlamp Review

Black Diamond Headlamp review

Through a promotion conducted by The Edge in conjunction with RAM mountaineering, I was offered a free BD Spot headlamp to test, on the premise that most people buy head torches like they vote…”out of habit”. Yes, I am guilty of that...the head torch bit. I own three Petzl’s (an old Zoom, a tikka and a tikka XP) and have never considered buying BD, no matter how flashy (excuse the pun) they look!

Sceptically I inserted the batteries. No struggling with fingernail clicks or pressure points. Just overextend the hinged back, and it all clicks open. Not a bad start, if you consider having to change batteries with frozen hands and thick gloves on top of a real mountain, this could be a winner. I then made the mistake of looking at the front whilst switching it on. Dazzling… would be an understatement. Blinding power would be more like it. The row of LEDs blasted my retina with such power, I though I was having an bad acid trip for 10 minutes after. Like most people, I never read the instructions. On survival kit, if you can’t figure it logically by pushing buttons for a minute, its not worth having. Again, the lamp scores. A big click changes between wide beam and straight beam, and half clicks step down from blinding mode to bright, to less bright, and then flashing, all on one big glove accessible button.

OK, so how bright is this lamp. Lets put it this way. In the old days, and I won’t give my age away here, but it was after hand held torches, but before LED’s, we had the Petzl Zoom. It carried a great big flat battery on the back which lasted 12 hours, had a good beam, and if you wanted to light up the mountain on a search and rescue trip, you changed to the halogen bulb, which gulped down your battery in 3 hours flat. When LED’s appeared on the scene, despite their size, weight and battery life advantage, in the back of my mind they were good base camp lights, suitable for braaing, reading and finding your socks at the bottom of your tent, but at the end of the day, you never felt real confident that you had the power to find your way through the rocky maze at the top of Blouberg at 2am in the morning, or navigate your way across the berg in the dark. I think that gap has finally been bridged. I played around the neighbourhood on single LED mode with full power, and you could swear that the police had stealth helicopters, judging by the power of the beam that was lighting up objects two to three houses away from where I stood.

So is there anything I don’t like about it? Hmmm, let me think. I did notice a little envy in the eyes of my wife and kids, as I slipped it next to my bed, ready to blast ESKOM next failure into oblivionJ

Peter Adrian