Hybeam Pop Up Lantern

Where I live power outages happen quite often. Sometimes they are at night and I only know about them when I get up in the morning and see the clocks on the appliances blinking at me. Other times they happen during the day and are an inconvenience but not really a problem as there is enough light coming in the windows. The ones that bother me happen at dusk or early evening when it's too early to go to bed but too dark to see. For those, I keep flashlights (yes, plural) very handy. I will say that I have always been a sucker for inexpensive tools, knives and flashlights.

Yes, I have good quality products too, but I like the inexpensive ones so as not to wear out my good stuff.  I know, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

A while back my mother gave me a Hybeam 2-in-1 Pop Up LED Lantern and flashlight. I said "Thanks Mom" and set it aside. One day prior to the last couple outages I saw the box sitting on my desk and decided to put some batteries in it and check it out. It seemed to work fine in both the flashlight and lantern modes.It has a Hi, Low and Strobe effects, which work in the order listed.

About a month later the power went out, the Hybeam was close at hand so I decided to try it out.  It worked great as a flashlight, both Hi and Low settings were plenty good enough in the house.  I decided to try reading using the lantern. For me, I needed the high setting to provide enough light to read. It took a few times to find the right place to set the lantern where I could read without the light hitting my eyes, but I've had to do that with other lanterns too.

All in all, I have to say I'm impressed with the performance of this little critter. It takes 3 AA batteries which should power it for quite a while. I put alkaline batteries in it, but will probably switch to rechargeable batteries when they wear out. I'm going to order a few more of these. I'm thinking 4, 2 for the house and 2 for the center console of the car but might make it an even half dozen so I can put a couple in the go box too.

There are many styles of lanterns like this, but this is the first I've tried and so I can only report on this particular one. If you're looking for a combo lantern/flashlight I can wholeheartedly recommend the Hybeam.