Lupine Piko 3
Price: £325
From: Zyro www.zyro.co.uk
The latest Piko has new LEDs for eyes: two Cree XM-L jobs kicking out a combined 750 lumens (the previous Piko was 550). The light is very much the same design and excellent construction as before. A satisfyingly chunky and rubber-armoured battery is carried in your backpack (or rear jersey/jacket pocket) and a cable runs from there into the side of the super dinky headlamp unit on your helmet. The lamp unit is amazingly compact and unnoticeably lightweight on your head. This lightness also means that you don’t have to wrestle the Velcro strap of the mount mega-tight to keep the unit stable. The lamp stays put and although it’s relatively free and easy to adjust for tilt, it doesn’t creep out of your requested angle during rough riding. Operating the light is no-nonsense. The rubber button on top of the lamp is easily located and actuated on-the-fly. There’s four output settings to cycle through which, for our small brains, was one setting too many to remember/count/fathom which setting you’re switching through to. Lupine’s engineers always get a lot of illumination out of on-paper-mediocre lumens and the Piko is no exception, throwing out a lovely clean, smooth pool of light. It may not penetrate as far as some but that’s only an issue on super straight, super fast descents really. Burn times are good: two hours on full power makes it switch-on-and-forget for most rides.
Overall: Exquisitely made. Small but powerful. Not as much bang for your buck compared to some of the uglier mail order alternatives.
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