Inspection light

Pretty good. I've had a 60 LED one for about 2 years now and it's amazingly bright and versatile. Only problem is, I've sorta neglected the Ni-Cd battery and it doesn't hold a charge for very long now.

Check eBay. Don't go less than 25 LEDs, though. I borrowed a friends 16 LED one and I could barely tell the time off my wrist watch.

Par for the course with cheap Ni-Cads. But they don't suffer from being left discharged like a car battery - but do by being run *totally* flat as in leaving the lamp on.

Hey, it cost £52.99 two years ago! I resent that ;-)

If it had decent Ni-Cads they should last a lot longer than that. Might be worth replacing them.

They look nice. The MOT chap used one, I noticed. Looking at the specifications of some of them, I'm wondering if they are suitable for occasional use, especially a use involving holding up (perhaps for long periods of time without a suitable place to 'hang' the 'ward'), handling and moving the 'ward' a lot while you may be in an awkward position, for example, body half twisted on your back looking up underneath the car into a hard to get at recess.

They are heavy: 3 lb (roughly 1½ bags of the usual packaging of sugar) They are unwieldy: 16 in or so long, and thick all around too. The worst is the power source: NiCd in my experience has been a disaster (Wish they could change those to NiMH soon; still heavy but can be managed properly); SLA is just too expensive for a replacement (£23 a go in the case of a 6V 4Ah one).

is currently selling one traditional model with fluorescent tubes andmain AC power supply for under a tenner. I think for the moment I'll stick with my 8" hand torch which has a magnet at its base, and has been using NiMH AA cells (3) very successfully (though fiddly to replace every two weeks or so).

It's a bit random with the cheap ones, some are very good * some are s**te & without seeing them or buying 1Watt Luxeons there's no easy way of telling.