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The charging circuit on our Ring Cyba-lite Rechargeable LED lantern having seemingly died in a rather smelly electrical way, I went hunting for a replacement. It wasn't intended to be our main light, we have a couple of gas lanterns and a mains inspection lamp for EHU times.

Intended for use around the kids when we don't want to use the gas ones.

I ended up with a Varta 4W LED 300 Lumen Lantern. And I'm very impressed with it. (Also sold under the Ring Cyba-lite brand (as the Vega) and Silverline that I know of, and Rayovac in the US if you want to look it up)

It seems much better designed than a lot of cheap 'chuck a handful of so so cheap LEDs's in a  lamp' type. It has 3 very bright LED's facing up, covered with a plastic sort of dome. Over this fits a plastic diffuser/reflector to spread the light out. It runs on 3 D cells (not the typical AA cells).

Feels well constructed, with rubbery bits on the handle and body. Battery compartment is easily accessed via twisting the base. It's pretty compact, though relatively heavy with the batteries in (about 900g I think), but that makes it nice and stable :-)

Light output is very good, probably at least twice as bright as out old one, makes a great sitting around the table lamp as it isn't too big.

It's best trick though is that removing the plastic diffuser, you can up end the lantern and hang it from a tent etc. (it has a hook on the base - see the piccie on the Amazon page)). It makes a truely excellent area light then. I used it for the first time this weekedn in our Minnesota 4 which has a 3x2m approx living area. It lit this up really really well. I'm pretty fussy about my  lighting andI like a good light for reading and this fine just as it is. I often need to supplement with head torch with other lights. I think it will deal just fine as well witht he bigger area of our Khyam Ridgipod.

I'm waiting for more use to see what the run time is. But with it using D cells I have high hopes for a good run time. Certainly 2 night sof camping with it being used for at least 5-6 hours made no impact on it yet. I reckon I may get  about  a week out of it. We shall see.

Currently I'm using Alakaline cells (Duracell Procell at about 75p a cell when you buy a box of 10). i'm going to experiment with rechargeables, but am holding back on using D cells NiMH. high capacity ones (10000 mAh) are expensive (Alakaline are probably about 15000 mAh). Cheap ones are low capacity, they are basically just repackaged  AA cells and driving 3 high power LEDs won't last long I expect. And really I'd want low self discharge ones so as not to have to recharge the cells every time I wanted to use the lamp

So i'm going to try some AA niMH cells in D cell adapters at some point and see how they last.

But so far I'm impressed and would recommend it if you are looking for this sort of lantern. I think it's really the first LED lantern I've used/seen that puts out a decent amount of light