Kelty, a name long known in the camping and most things outdoors, is famous for looking at camping products and well, making them better. It was only a matter of time before Kelty decided to update the most essential of camp needs – lights – and make them that much more essential. To begin with, the Kelty Lumaspot Rhythm isn’t just your average lantern. Think of it as a lantern, jukebox, and disco-ball… rolled into one. It’s got all of the functions of a basic lantern, but updated to include mood lighting and a speaker so that you can listen to your favorite music while relaxing outdoors.
The Kelty Lumaspot Rhythm Lantern in full dusk.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE KELTY LUMASPOT RHYTHM
The good folks at Kelty sent the Lumaspot along for testing with the venerable Kelty Mach 4 tent (which you can read about here) – this was perfect, as both are intended for car camping adventures. The Kelty Lumaspot Rhythm, at a weight of 27.5 oz is surprisingly light for a lantern, but not exactly intended for backpacking. This is the weight of the lantern without batteries; with batteries (it takes 6 D cell batteries to power this beast) it feels pretty hefty. The finishing touches look and feel solid as well; the upper swivel (from controlled light beam to ambient light) works well, and both the plastic casing and glass feel very heavy duty. It stands about half again as high as a Nalgene water bottle, and is about half again as big around.
Check out the focus on that spotlight on the Kelty Lumaspot Rhythm
FUNCTIONS OF THE KELTY LUMASPOT RHYTHM
One of the cool features of the Kelty Lumaspot Rhythm is the fact that it not only has bright and dim settings with white light, but that it also has a “party” mode. In this mode, the lights will either stay in a color of your choice, or cycle back and forth between all colors. It’s fairly nifty, and looks really cool on your campsite at night. It gave members of our car camping excursion an easy point of reference for differentiating between camp spots when coming back from walks together at night. Quite possibly the coolest feature of the Kelty Lumaspot Rhythm, however, is it’s ability to play music – it has a built in speaker. You can connect any phone, ipod, or other music device via a built in cord (the same size as a standard headphone jack) and voila – no more tinny sounding phone speakers when camping. The speakers had decent production, and I really enjoyed listening to them. We listened to them for almost four hours on one trip; the only thing that stopped us was that my phone died.
Mood lighting on the Kelty Lumaspot Rhythm
FINAL THOUGHTS ON THE KELTY LUMASPOT RHYTHM
Overall, the Kelty Lumaspot Rhythm makes a great addition to any car camping excursion. The spot light is bright enough to illuminate 60 feet in front of you, and the ambient light provides almost a thirty foot radius, enough for any campsite. $69.95 would be a great price for a decent lantern, much less one with all the frills built in. For more info on the Lumaspot and other Kelty gear, visit www.kelty.com.
Kelty – bringing you the Kelty Lumapspot Rhythm – destined to become your favorite car camping companion.
