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Outdoors · Nitecore

Nitecore NU25 UL

Forty-five grams with the cord on. You stop deciding whether to bring a headlamp at all.

A headlamp's battery format constrains everything else — #4

Overall

7.6

out of 10

Axis scores

Outdoors is scored on these 4 axes. The total is their plain average — nothing is weighted.

Nitecore NU25 UL — axis scores out of 10Horizontal bar chart of editorial scores out of 10 across 4 axes. Bars run from a shared zero baseline; longer is better. Nitecore NU25 UL: Performance 7.0, Value 7.8, Durability 6.4, Design 9.2.PerformanceNitecore NU25 UL — Performance 7.0 out of 107.0ValueNitecore NU25 UL — Value 7.8 out of 107.8DurabilityNitecore NU25 UL — Durability 6.4 out of 106.4DesignNitecore NU25 UL — Design 9.2 out of 109.2Editorial score out of 10 — higher is better
  • Performance — How well it does the core job
  • Value — What the same money buys elsewhere
  • Durability — Failure and fade reports past the one-year mark
  • Design — Build quality and how it sits in a room

Specs

Weight
45 g with the elastic cord
Max output
400 lumens
Battery
650 mAh sealed cell, USB-C
Water resistance
IP66
Max runtime
45 hours on the lowest setting

As published by the manufacturer. We didn't measure these ourselves.

Is it for you

Buy it if

  • Counting grams, where the alternative is carrying no lamp at all
  • Camp light, cooking, and reading rather than covering ground fast
  • A backup lamp that lives in the lid pocket permanently

Skip it if

  • You want a battery you can swap or replace when it wears out
  • The lamp will be worn over a beanie or helmet on rough ground
  • You need the rated output to last, since 400 lumens is a short burst

Forty-five grams changes a decision, not an experience. At this weight the lamp stops competing with other lamps and starts competing with going without one, which is the comparison most gram-counters were actually making. Everything below follows from that trade.

Nitecore got there by deleting the battery door. The cell is sealed in, and when it stops holding charge the lamp is finished — no swap on the trail, no replacement pack, no repair. Two or three hundred cycles is the realistic horizon for a small lithium-ion cell used hard, and a lamp used a dozen nights a year will outlast the buyer’s interest in it. One thru-hike a year is a different arithmetic.

The rated output is a burst, not a setting. Turbo runs at full brightness for a short window before thermal and voltage step-down pulls it back, and there is nowhere for the heat to go in a housing this small. Treat the top mode as a way to identify something forty meters off, not as a mode you walk in.

Where it holds up is the low end. The floodlight at low is genuinely usable for cooking and tent admin and lasts long enough that you stop rationing it, which is the mode a camp lamp actually spends its life in.

The UL version replaces the headband with a thin elastic cord, and that is where the grams came from. On bare hair it works. Over a beanie it creeps, and on a helmet it needs a bracket that this lamp does not ship with. The cord also has no give at the buckle, so adjusting it in the dark with cold fingers is fiddly in a way a flat band is not.

IP66 covers driving rain from any direction and stops well short of submersion. Owner reports of dead units after a river crossing or a dunked pack are consistent with the rating rather than a defect — it is doing what it says.

Buttons are two small rubber pads on the top face, close together, with a mode order you have to learn. Gloved, you will hit the wrong one. There is a lockout, and on a lamp with a sealed battery it is worth using every single time the lamp goes in a pack.

The plastic housing feels like what it is. It survives being sat on in a pack and it will crack if you step on it, and at this weight nobody should be surprised by either.

Last updated . The scoring method is on how we rank.