The Petzl Actik Core Headlamp is a high-powered 600 lumen dual power headlamp loaded with easy-to-use intuitive features including a single button control, a red light to preserve night vision, a battery meter, and an electronic lock to prevent accidental battery drain. It’s also a dual power headlamp that comes with a removable Petzl Core Rechargeable battery, but can also be powered by 3 AAA batteries without an extra adapter. This provides piece of mind and flexibility if you’re hiking or backpacking in remote locations where it’s difficult to plug into a wall to recharge a battery.
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- Product: Petzl Actik Core Headlamp (micro-USB , 3hr charge time)
- Type: Dual Power (included rechargeable battery or 3AAA batteries (all types))
- Battery: 1250 mAh included
- Weight: 2.9 oz / 82g
- Max Brightness: 600 lumens
- White Runtimes: 600 lumens – 2h; 100 lumens – 7h; 7 lumens – 100h
- Headband: Reflective strap
- Pros: dual power, intuitive control sequence, electronic lock, power meter
- Cons: not-USB C compatible, battery compartment takes practice to open/close
The Petzl Actik Core Headlamp is a finely made, high-powered headlamp with a few quirks that are easy to adapt to once you get used its operation.
Battery
The headlamp comes with a Petzl Core battery inside. This is a rechargeable battery which is compatible with other Petzl products. It can be removed from the headlamp and you can buy several of them if you want to carry extras. However, instead of recharging the headlamp, you recharge the battery, which has its own power meter, using a micro USB plug. It’s unfortunate that the battery isn’t USB-C compatible, which many brands and products are moving toward.
The Core battery holds 1250 mAh of power which is a bit on the low side in that it only provides up to 7 hours of burn time on the headlamp’s medium setting, which throws 100 lumens of light. In most circumstances, that should be plenty of light for backpacking. For example, when it gets dark, I just go to sleep and rarely use my headlamp when camping except to pee once or twice at night. If you plan on trail running in the dark, you may want a headlamp with a bigger battery and a longer runtime, but for the average three season hiker, 7 hours of runtime between charges is more than enough.
Command Sequence
The Petzl Actik Core headlamp has a single button on top which makes it fairly easy to remember the command sequence and cycle through it, even if you don’t use the headlamp every day. I just hate complicated command sequences, especially ones that require multiple interdependent buttons to use.
The headlamp has an electronic lock/unlock feature to prevent accidental battery drain, which I consider a must-have feature on any headlamp that will be carried in a backpack. It has three brightness settings: 600 lumens, 100 lumens, and 7 lumens, in a flood or wide beam pattern, along with a red mode and red strobe. While the headlamp is rated for 600 lumens on high power, you rarely need that much light for three-season hiking and backpacking. You’ll probably only use the 100 lumen setting once in a while, and the red mode most of the time, so you don’t want to blind your companions when sitting around the campfire at night.
Battery Compartment
The battery compartment door on the Petzl Actik Core takes a few go-rounds to acclimatize to. It’s a little difficult to open and get shut again. But once you do it a few times, you’ll see that you can use a fair amount of force to open it without breaking the door. You do need a strong thumbnail though.
Greg P. says to use the edge of one of the headstrap adjustment buckles to lever the battery compartment open, instead of your thumbnail. Nice! That works great.
Closing the battery compartment door is easier. It has a gasket around its periphery to keep water out. Once you see how the door fits into place, it’s easy to get it back in the right position.
Recommendation
The Petzl Actik Core Headlamp is a dual power headlamp with a single control button and an intuitive command sequence that’s easy to figure out (again and again), especially if you don’t use it all the time. The ability to use the rechargeable battery or 3 AAA batteries (without a special adapter) is a “core” capability that can extend the utility of the headlamp in more remote locales, or colder ones, because you can also use cold-resistant lithium AAA batteries.
While those are very worthwhile features, it’s a pity that the Petzl CORE battery is not USB-C compatible, since most hikers and backpackers and many gear manufacturers are trying to standardize on USB-C to minimize the number of recharging wires that people need to carry. I have no doubt that Petzl will make the CORE battery USB-C capable at some point in the future; the question is whether USB-C is important for you now, and whether you’ll willing to pay for a new CORE USB-C battery when and if one becomes available. While there are a growing number of rechargeable headlamps that are USB-C capable, having a dual power capability on a lightweight headlamp is still relatively rare and can be worthwhile to have. Carrying multiple charging cords isn’t a big deal for me, since I’ve been doing it for years now, but I think it’s a decision point worth considering depending on your circumstances.
Disclosure: Petzl donated a headlamp for review.
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