Lupine Wilma and Lupine Betty LED upgrades
I’ve upgraded my Lupine Wilma and Lupine Betty headlamps to the latest LED technology, and WOW, Lupine has done it again! See my review of the Lupine Wilma (and notes on Betty).
Lupine’s Betty/Wilma/Tesla lighting system is the best you can buy, end of story. Expect many years of service that will delight you. Use them as bike lights, a headlamp for hiking/backpacking/grilling at night, any dark corner, search and rescue, the Iditarod, and photography. Lupine doesn’t cheat on their lumen or battery life ratings: they easily outperform other lights rated similarly (on paper); beam quality/uniformity, color accuracy and brightness all are critical. I should know, I wasted time and money trying other expensive but inferior brands a few years ago, back when I was riding long distances late at night on my bike.
In the US, visit Gretna Bikes (relationship: satisfied customer). Gretna sells and services Lupine lighting products (sorry no B&H link for Lupine!). Over the years I’ve purchased a large handful of both Lupine Betty and Wilmas; I love ’em. For night-time bike riding, I use three Lupine Betty lampheads, two on the bar, one on the helmet. Cars sometimes back up for me on narrow roads, and I can scream down a hill at 30mph cuz I can see so well with 5100 lumens in front of me.
Lupine’s modestly-priced upgrade kit (relative to the price of a new lamphead) has me very impressed for three compelling reasons. First, virtually no headlamp manufacturer ever offers an upgrade path. Yet Lupine has done so twice now, at about 20% of the original lamphead price, thus preserving my investment and maintaining backward compatibility with all my cables and batteries. That’s serious value if you’ve ever seen your previous investment ignored, as I have, by other lighting vendors.
The Betty user-installable upgrade not only provides 25% higher light output at the same power draw, but the light itself has notably more accurate color balance. Good color balance means better depth perception. Most LED lights are extremely blue; bright, but difficult to see with. Lupine sources only the smallest fraction of the best LEDs available, seven of the Cree XP-G LEDs in the Betty, emitting an honest 1750 lumens with a custom designed lens for perfect illumination.
For photographers, the Lupine Betty is more than just a headlamp to find your way around in the dark, but also a creative tool for night-time photography. Or fill-light, as I noted in some of my Zeiss ZE 100/2 Makro-Planar examples in the forest.
No, those are not the Lupine lights at frame top! But one previous generation Wilma headlamp is on my daughter’s head at bottom, upgraded now to the new LEDs.
