18:15 on a Wednesday evening in late February, minus four and dropping, and the storm I'd been outrunning for five hours up the autobahn had beaten me to the Harz. Matthias was waiting under the carport of the Försterhaus with a head torch in one hand and wire cutters in the other, and the first thing he said wasn't hello — it was "good, you brought the bright one. We've got a Schmalreh caught in the fence at Kirrung Two."
He didn't ask what I'd come to test, and he didn't care. There was a roe buck yearling in a storm-damaged deer fence, it was going dark, and the HL28 was about to get tested by the one job no review ever covers: not finding an animal, but working on one at arm's length, in the dark, with both hands needed and the animal terrified.
The verdict up front: four nights in the Harz winter — a fence rescue in a storm, a Rucksacksitz on a frozen maize field, a driven boar hunt, and a Nachsuche across a snow-melt stream — and the HL28 did every job I put it to.
Here's the stack you won't find on any other headlamp I've run: three dedicated hunting colours switched by turning the head, a Fresnel zoom from 5° spot to 42° flood, stepless 2–100% dimming, a 90° tilt with a real lock, a 4-level battery gauge you can check mid-hunt, and 10h 40m of green runtime off two 21700 cells that fired up at -10°C.
One cost buys all of that: weight. 590g loaded is the heaviest lamp on my shelf, and it is the single thing wrong with this light. If you need maximum function and you'll carry the grams, it's the best hunting headlamp I've used. If you want light and simple, it's the wrong lamp and no review should talk you into it. Full story below.
The Kit
The revier sits on the Lower Saxony side of the Harz — spruce blocks, beech ridges, steep snow-melt streams, and the kind of winter where the forest is a wet dark place that eats headlamps for a living. Matthias has run it for thirty years, most of those as a professional Jagdaufseher before he handed the lease back and kept the work. I've been up here three winters running, usually for the last week of the Saujagd season when the pressure on the crop fields peaks and everything happens at once.
The kit is one HL28 Artemis in the tri-colour configuration — red, green and white LEDs behind a Fresnel lens, switched by rotating the lamp head — plus the two 21700 cells that ship with it.
Full disclosure: Brinyte also offers a UV/IR variant of this headlamp, and I did not test it. I don't own a digital night vision unit, so there was nothing to point the IR at, and I won't write claims about kit I haven't fired. Everything below is the red/green/white model.
First handling impressions, in the Försterhaus kitchen with the storm hammering the shutters: the machining and HAIII anodizing match the T28 hunting light I've been running, no rattles, no flex.
Then I counted up what's actually built into this one lamp, because it's the reason it exists:
I've carried three lamps in my pack at various times to cover colour, zoom and battery monitoring. This one lamp replaces all three — and everything it replaces came off my belt.
Then I picked it up and understood the bill. 395g before the batteries, close to 590g loaded. That weight isn't bad engineering — it's where the features live. The battery pack, the tilt mechanism, the rotary head: every function on this lamp has mass. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on how you hunt, and that's the honest spine of this review.
One honest note on the system: the 21700 cells are shared with the T28 and T18 — one spare-cell kit covers all of it — but the magnetic charging cable is proprietary to this lamp. Batteries shared, cable proprietary. Know that before you buy.
N1 The Storm and the Fence Rescue
The Kirrung sit I'd driven five hours for was cancelled before I'd unpacked. Matthias's rule, thirty years deep: nothing moves in a Harz storm except the ones that have to.
But the storm had bent a section of wildlife fence at the top of Kirrung Two, and a roe buck — a Schmalreh, this year's male, not yet a full yearling — had gone through the gap and got himself tangled. Wire around the left hind leg, wire caught on the other side. Not bleeding badly, not calm either.
Under German hunting law this is a reportable animal and a job for the Jagdausübungsberechtigte, which in this case is Matthias — and it's genuinely a headlamp job. You need light. You need both hands — one for the animal, one for the wire cutters. You need the light to be quiet, because a white LED blast at full output will have the buck thrashing and doing real damage to itself before you've got a grip.
So this is what the HL28 actually did on its first night. Red at 10% on the walk-in — the buck could see us coming without the light being a threat. Switched to white, rolled down to about 15% on the tail knob, head tilted to 90° and locked, beam pointed at the wire section and not at the animal's eyes.
I held the buck's head and shoulder while Matthias cut. Ninety degrees of tilt is the whole difference here: the beam sat on the work, both my hands were free, and neither of us had to hold a torch or clamp it under a chin in freezing rain. Stepless dimming mattered too — I rolled it up to read the second wire and back down without the flash you get stepping through modes, which would have been the thing that set the animal off.
Eight minutes, one cut wire, and the buck went off down the ride on three legs and a bad attitude.
"That tilt is better than mine."— Matthias, 30 years on this revier, in the way a 30-year man says things
That was the review settled before I'd sat a single Kirrung.
N2 The Rucksacksitz
Thursday the storm cleared and the Harz went blue and frozen. The high seat I'd planned was a flooded walk from the track, so Matthias offered the alternative he actually prefers in late season: a Rucksacksitz — sit on your pack, no seat, on the edge of a maize strip where a sounder has been coming out of the spruce every evening for a week.
A word on legality, because it matters: hunting with artificial light in Germany is banned at the federal level under the BJagdG, and any exception lives in each Bundesland's own hunting law — granted in writing by the lower hunting authority, and the rules differ enormously from state to state. On this revier we hold that written authorisation for Lampenjagd on Schwarzwild, which is the only reason this sit was legal. If you're reading this from another Bundesland or another country, check your own law before you buy a tri-colour lamp for night work.
Setup: pack on the frozen ground at the field edge, HL28 on my head in green mode dialled to 20%, rifle across the knees. Two and a half hours of not moving.
Let me be direct about this, because it's the one real problem with this lamp and it deserves a full paragraph, not a footnote: the HL28 is heavy, and on a static sit you will know it.
This is the harshest weight test a headlamp can face — sitting on a pack, no back support, no high seat frame to rest against, nothing to do but hold still. By hour one the 590 grams were present. By hour two I was shifting the lamp on my forehead every ten minutes. I never got a hot spot — the headband genuinely distributes well — but the mass doesn't distribute away. It's there, and it stays there.
The fair framing: the same sit is exactly where the rest of the stack paid for itself. I checked the battery gauge twice without touching the lamp. I rolled the zoom out to read the hedge line at a hundred metres and back in for the maize corner without changing lamps. I had the red rolled down to 2% as the fox closed, and rolled back up when the sounder came, with no clicks and no flash. Every one of those jobs would have meant a second lamp on my belt or a filter clipped on in the dark. The weight bought those functions. Whether you make that trade is a question about your hunting, not about the lamp's quality.
The fox came first. Ninety seconds into a short calling sequence on the call app, eyes opened at the hedge line, about a hundred metres out, and started working in on the red. Red at 2% through the tail knob is barely there — enough to read her, not enough to tell her anything's on. She came down the hedge, cut the angle at sixty, finished broadside at eighty with her ears pinned. At no point did she react to the beam.
What she reacted to was me. Halfway through the sit I'd heard a branch crack in the spruce behind me — post-storm, still falling — and I reached up to rotate the head from red to green in case it was boar. The rotary is silent. It's quick. But it happens on top of your head, in her eyeline, and the movement of my hand at my head was the thing she clocked. She was gone before I'd finished the turn.
Not the light. The hand.
And to be fair to the lamp: any solution costs the same movement or worse — a second lamp from the belt, a filter clipped on in the dark, all of it means a hand at your head. The HL28 already makes the switch as small as it can be. The lesson isn't "buy something else"; it's that on a mixed night, the movement itself is the price, whatever you carry.
The sounder came twenty minutes later, out of the spruce at the corner of the maize, five heads, exactly the pattern Matthias's trail camera had been showing. I rolled the brightness down with the tail knob as they crossed the open ground — no click, no flash — and I held the beam just ahead of them, on the corner where they'd break cover, not on their backs.
That's the technique that matters with green on a pressured sounder: the moment the spot sits directly on a light-shy group at close range, you're gambling. Only once they'd settled onto the bait did I let the edge of the beam touch them, and from first contact to the shot they never lifted a snout off the bait.
The leading Bache fed broadside at fifty-five metres and I took her off the sticks. Same lamp that scanned the field closed out the gralloch: tilt the head down, white flood, both hands free on a frozen carcass in the dark. Field dressed, tagged, on the sledge by half eleven.
N3 The Driven Hunt and the Nachsuche
Saturday was a Treibjagd — the Jagdgenossenschaft's last driven boar day of the season, twelve guns, a full line of beaters with two dogs, grey sleet coming in off the fields from first light.
This is the other half of the European headlamp job: not the shot, but everything around it. The HL28 rode my head from seven in the morning to well past dark — tilted up and out of the way during the drives themselves, because you don't do light work around the muzzle during a drive; reloads happen with the muzzle downrange in your own safety sector, and the lamp stays out of it. Tilted down for dog work, for moving between posts, and at 45° for the long walks between stands when I wanted the beam on my footing without blasting the forestry track.
The tilt lock never slipped once, even at a jog between posts. The headband stayed put under a hood. It sleeted for two hours straight and the lamp never flickered — IPX-6 is doing real work at that rating.
The day earned its keep after dark. A Keiler hit late in the final drive had gone into thick cover and the drive was called before the recovery. Bernhard came up from the next valley with his Hannoverian Schweisshund, Fenne — a VwH-verified Nachsuchengespann, which is how this has to work in Germany: after the shot we held the Ansitzdauer, nobody went into the cover before the certified dog team arrived, and the handler runs the line while the shooter walks behind.
By the time Fenne was on the blood we were working the forest edge in full darkness. White flood, head tilted down, brightness rolled to about 60% — and blood on beech leaves read dark and distinct in a way that genuinely surprised me against wet leaf litter and old snow. The stepless dimming mattered more here than anywhere: I swept the ride wide to follow the line, then rolled the beam down to read a single droplet without the field washing out.
Two things on this Nachsuche worth writing down. One: we crossed a snow-melt stream twice, and the HL28 is IPX-6, not submersion — I held the lamp above the water both times and that's a habit you have to actually remember.
Two: before the line I'd checked the gauge — two bars left after a full driven day — and swapped in the spare pack from my rucksack, a thirty-second job with gloves on. The vibration warning never fired all night, and that's the point: between the gauge and two minutes of habit, the lamp made running out of light on a blood line a thing you have to actively try to do.
N4 The Cold-Soak Payoff
Sunday morning, 06:10, minus ten. The HL28 had sat in the truck footwell since Wednesday night — windows cracked, on purpose, because the 21700 cold-weather claim was the one spec I genuinely doubted and this was the coldest night of the trip.
It fired up at full output on the first press and I walked the last Ansitzgang back to the truck on red, two kilometres through frozen spruce, with the beam never faltering.
Matthias came down to the gate with two coffees. We stood by the truck and talked about the Keiler, and about the Schmalreh in the fence, and about whether the weight on a Rucksacksitz is a real problem or just something you get used to. I don't know which it is yet.
What I know is that a lamp that handled a rescue, a three-hour static sit, a driven hunt and a Nachsuche in four days is a lamp that has done a real week's work.
The Cold-Soak Test
Because the 21700 cold-weather claim was the one spec I doubted, I made it boring and repeatable. Wednesday night the lamp went into the truck at full charge, windows cracked, ambient dropped to -10°C by morning. Sunday morning, four nights later, it fired up at full output on the first press and ran a two-kilometre walk on red without a wobble.
That's not a laboratory result — it's one cold snap — but the 2× 21700 pack carried more usable runtime in the frost than any smaller cell I've owned in the same conditions, and that's the only claim on the marketing sheet that actually matters to me.
Runtime Log
Numbers from my notebook, not the spec sheet:
Thursday sit + Saturday recovery came off roughly half a charge across both. Rated 10h 40m; over four nights I never got near the bottom of a fresh pair.
The fox sit at 2–10% and the walk-in barely moved the four-level indicator. Rated 8h 10m; I never came close.
Fence rescue, gralloch, driven-hunt gaps and the Nachsuche together used maybe a third of a pack. Rated 6h 20m at full output; at working brightness, much longer.
Gauge checked mid-sit, mid-drive, before the blood line — every spare-pack decision came off the gauge. Vibration warning: a backstop I never needed. Magnetic USB-C: full charge ~6.5h, snap works with gloves on.
What Annoyed Me
Every review without this section is selling you something. This lamp has exactly one real problem, and I'll give it the space it deserves first — then confirm the features, because the marketing claims all held.
❌ The one real problem: weight
Close to 590g loaded is the heaviest headlamp I've ever put on my head for a full hunt, and on static sits it is a genuine cost.
The Rucksacksitz on night two is the evidence: two and a half hours on a pack with no back support, and by hour two I was shifting the lamp on my forehead every ten minutes.
On a moving driven hunt — jogging between posts, hood up, sleet for two hours — I never once noticed it. On the Nachsuche, working a blood line, I never once noticed it. The pattern is clean:
If your hunting moves, the weight disappears. If your hunting sits still for hours, it doesn't.
That's the whole trade. If you hunt mostly from a high seat or a pack and weight is your first buying criterion, this is not your lamp — buy a 150g white-only unit and accept what it can't do. For everyone else, read the list below and decide if the functions are worth the grams. For me, after this week, they were.
✅ The features that held up
Red at 2% never spooked the fox. Green at 20% — beam held ahead, the only way to run it on pressured boar — carried every scan. White at 60% read blood on beech leaves and old snow. No filters, no clipped-on diffusers.
5° spot read the far gate at 500 metres on night one; 42° flood walked ice-slick rides evenly, no hot centre. Smooth all week without creep.
The single most-used feature of the week. Roll down as the fox closes, roll up when the sounder appears, roll down to read a single blood droplet. No clicks, no mode-flashes.
Held at a jog between posts, held through eight minutes of fence-rescue work with both hands occupied. Never drooped, never slipped.
Checked mid-sit, mid-drive, before the blood line. Knowing, rather than guessing, is worth having.
Four nights of Harz frost down to -10°C, cold-soaked in the truck, fired up at full output every single time.
Specs
| Colour | Flood / Spot | Beam Distance | Peak Intensity | Runtime |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| White (SFT-25R) | 820 lm / 420 lm | 678 m | 115,000 cd | 6 h 20 m |
| Red (XPE2 R5) | 180 lm / 100 lm | 332 m | 27,500 cd | 8 h 10 m |
| Green (XPE2 R5) | 300 lm / 150 lm | 400 m | 40,000 cd | 10 h 40 m |
Shared: rotary colour head, stepless tail knob 2–100%, 90° tilt with lock, Fresnel zoom 5°–42°, 2× 21700 5000mAh with magnetic USB-C charging, 4-level battery indicator, low-battery vibration, A6061-T6 aluminium with HAIII anodizing, IPX-6, 1m drop rating, 395g without batteries, 5-year warranty. Full details on the official HL28 product page. For the science behind which colour for which species, see our light colour guide.
The €180 Question
One of the guns on Saturday's drive runs a Ledlenser H19R Core — about €200 last I checked, and a genuinely good lamp, and the reason most German hunters reach for it at the counter is the name and the service network behind it. Side by side after a full weekend, here's the honest read.
Brinyte HL28 vs Ledlenser H19R Core
| Spec | Brinyte HL28 Artemis | Ledlenser H19R Core |
|---|---|---|
| Hunting colours | Red + green + white, switched at the head, no filters | White + colour filters (clipped on) |
| Zoom | Fresnel 5°–42° | Fixed focus with focus ring |
| Dimming | Stepless 2–100%, no clicks | Stepped modes |
| Battery | 2× 21700 5000mAh (included) | Built-in Li-ion pack |
| Battery swap in the field | Yes — ~30 seconds with gloves | No — charge the lamp |
| Battery gauge | 4-level, checkable mid-hunt | LED indicator |
| Cold behaviour | Fired up at full output after -10°C soak | Not tested by me |
| Weight on the head | ~590g loaded — heavy | Lighter |
| Service network | Mail-in / EU warehouse | Dealer counter across Germany |
| Price | €179.95 | ~€200 |
His money bought brand, distribution and a deep accessory ecosystem — and a lamp that's lighter on the head. Mine bought the stack: three hunting colours to his one white-plus-filter, a true 5°–42° zoom, stepless dimming, a battery gauge, and a swappable battery pack that cold-soaked at -10°C without complaint.
If your hunting is simple and your priority is weight, his lamp wins and there's no argument. If your hunting is mixed — colour changes, distance work, long nights, cold — the HL28 is the one doing three lamps' work.
I know which lamp I'd buy again: it's the one that was on my head when the dog found the Keiler.
🛒 Brinyte HL28 Artemis — €179.95
Red · Green · White tri-colour. 2× 21700 batteries and magnetic charging cable included. UV/IR variant available separately.
Buying From Europe: Warranty and Spares
Because this is the question a German hunter asks last and decides on, let's answer it plainly.
Shipping: Brinyte ships to EU addresses from a European warehouse, which means typical delivery of a few working days rather than a customs lottery from China — check the product page for your country's current lead time.
Warranty: the HL28 carries a five-year warranty, handled through Brinyte's support rather than a walk-in gun-shop counter — keep your order confirmation, and know that the process is mail-in. That's the honest trade against the Ledlenser dealer network, and it's priced into the €20 difference.
Spares: the 21700 cells are the same platform as the T28 and T18, so spare cells are a shared purchase; the magnetic charging cable is proprietary to the HL28, and if you lose one it's a small order from the same EU channel rather than a wait from overseas.
Buy or Skip
✅ Buy it if you demand maximum performance
A function-over-weight tool. The list of things it does that mainstream headlamps don't is the whole point:
- Multiple hunting colours without filters or a second lamp — red, green, white, switched at the head
- Zoom on your head — 5° spot for distance, 42° flood for close work, one optic
- Precise light control — stepless 2–100% dimming, zero clicks, the feature that mattered most every night
- Nachsuche, fence rescue, hands-free work — locked tilt + white flood + dimming, the best setup I've run
- Long winter nights — 4-level gauge + swappable 21700 packs, proven at -10°C
- One battery system — same 21700 cells as the T28 and T18
❌ Skip it if
- You want a light headlamp — 590g loaded is the heaviest I've run. If weight is your first criterion, no feature list changes that. Buy a 150g unit and be happy.
- Your hunting is one simple job — a dusk walk in on white, nothing else. A single-purpose lamp is half the weight and does your job just as well.
- You mostly call foxes on static sits — a dedicated red lamp on your belt means you never move your hand to your head. That movement cost me a fox on night two.
- You run night vision — I didn't test the UV/IR variant; the T28-IR review has tested IR numbers
- You need a walk-in service counter on day one — Ledlenser has it, Brinyte doesn't. Read the section above and decide.
FAQ
Is the Brinyte HL28 good for wild boar hunting?
Yes — green is the boar colour on this lamp. It carried every scan on my four-night test without spooking a sounder, running the beam ahead of the group at low brightness until they settled on the bait. The 10h 40m green runtime covers a full winter night. After the shot, tilt the head down and switch to white for the gralloch with both hands free.
Which HL28 colour for foxes?
Red. On my Rucksacksitz the fox worked in on the call at a hundred metres and never reacted to the beam at 2% on the tail knob. One caveat: switching colour means turning the lamp head, and that hand movement at your head is what a fox can clock — though any alternative costs the same movement or worse.
Can the HL28 handle blood tracking (Nachsuche)?
Yes — white flood at 820 lumens with the head tilted 90° down is built for it. Blood read dark and distinct against beech leaves and old snow on my test, and the stepless dimming let me go from a wide sweep to a single droplet without stepping through modes. In Germany, remember the Nachsuche itself runs through a certified dog team — the lamp is your tool on the line, not a licence to search on your own.
Does the HL28 work in freezing temperatures?
I cold-soaked it in a truck overnight at -10°C during a Harz storm and it fired up at full output, then ran a two-kilometre walk on red without a wobble. One cold snap isn't a laboratory study, but the 2× 21700 pack carried usable runtime in the frost where smaller cells I've owned sagged.
Is the HL28 good for wildlife rescue work?
Yes — this is the use case nobody writes about and it's where the headlamp earned its place first. I freed a roe buck from a storm-damaged fence at night: 90° tilt with both hands free, red at low output to calm the animal, stepless dimming to work without blinding it. A weapon light can't do this job.
Does the HL28 have night vision or IR?
There's an optional UV365/395 + IR850/IR940 variant of the HL28, but I don't own a digital night vision unit, so I did not test it. This review covers the tri-colour red/green/white model only. For tested IR performance, see our T28-IR review.
What does the HL28 offer that other hunting headlamps don't?
The full stack in one lamp: three dedicated hunting LEDs (red/green/white) switched at the head with no filters, a true 5°–42° Fresnel zoom, stepless 2–100% dimming with zero clicks, a 90° tilt with a real lock, a 4-level battery gauge, and 10h 40m of green runtime off 2× 21700 cells proven at -10°C. Most headlamps give you white plus maybe a red mode and fixed output steps. The cost of the stack is weight — about 590g loaded — so it suits hunters who need maximum function and will carry the grams.
How heavy is the HL28 and is it comfortable?
395g without batteries — roughly 590g loaded, and the heaviest hunting headlamp I've run. The pattern across my four nights was clean: on moving work — a driven hunt, a blood trail — I never noticed the weight. On a static Rucksacksitz, sitting on a pack with no back support, I was shifting it on my forehead by hour two. If you hunt moving, it's a non-issue. If you sit still for hours, it's the one thing you'll feel.
Is the HL28 waterproof?
IPX-6: heavy rain and sleet are fine — it sat through a Harz storm and a two-hour driven-hunt sleet without a flicker. It is not rated for submersion, so when I crossed a snow-melt stream on the Nachsuche I held it above the water. If your ground involves stream crossings, build that habit.
Is hunting with a headlamp legal in Europe?
Artificial light for hunting is banned at the federal level in Germany under the BJagdG; exceptions exist under each Bundesland's hunting law and require written authorisation from the lower hunting authority — and the rules differ enormously between states. On the Harz revier where I tested, we hold that written authorisation for Lampenjagd on Schwarzwild. Check your Landesjagdgesetz before hunting with artificial light.
How far does the Brinyte HL28 beam reach?
The white mode is rated at 678 metres beam distance and 115,000 candela. In the field, the 5° spot resolved a far gate at roughly 500 metres clean on night one, and nothing I could legally shoot at sat outside what the beam resolved. Green throws a rated 400 metres, red 332 metres.
How do you charge the Brinyte HL28?
It charges via a magnetic USB-C cable that snaps onto the rear pack — full charge in about 6.5 hours. The magnetic snap works with gloves on, which a tiny exposed port never did. One honest note: the cable is proprietary to this lamp, so if you lose it you order a spare from Brinyte — the 21700 cells themselves are shared with the T28 and T18 platforms.
What batteries does the HL28 use and are they included?
It runs on two 21700 5000mAh cells, and both ship in the box — no separate battery purchase needed. The same 21700 platform powers the Brinyte T28 and T18, so one spare-cell kit covers the whole system. The 2× 21700 pack is the reason the green mode runs a rated 10h 40m and why the lamp held up at -10°C.
What warranty does the Brinyte HL28 have?
Five years, with a 1-metre drop rating and IPX-6 ingress protection behind it. In practice, check the warranty process for your country before buying — Ledlenser's walk-in dealer network is its real advantage, so know what Brinyte's mail-in process looks like where you hunt. More on this in the Buying From Europe section above.
Brinyte HL28 vs Ledlenser H19R Core — which should I buy?
If your hunting is simple and weight is your first priority, the H19R Core wins — it's lighter and Ledlenser has a service counter in every German gun shop. If your hunting is mixed — colour changes, distance work, long nights, cold — the HL28 does three lamps' work: three hunting colours to the Ledlenser's white-plus-filter, a true 5°–42° zoom, stepless dimming, a battery gauge, and a swappable 2× 21700 pack, at about €20 less. The full comparison table is in The €180 Question section above.
About Brinyte
Founded in 2009, Brinyte builds professional hunting and tactical lighting backed by 50+ patents and ISO9001-certified manufacturing. Founder Xuping Feng leads an engineering team that field-tests every hunting light platform before release. Engineered for the mission. Trusted in the field.
