Outdoor Research Diode Hooded Jacket – Performance

Life used to be simple. If you were going somewhere cold and wet, you chose a synthetic fill and accepted a certain weight and bulk penalty. If it was going to be cold and dry, down with its high loft and small pack size was the answer.

But what if you’re not sure? What if you want one jacket that’ll handle both types of conditions? What if you want down warmth and pack size, but synthetic-type resilience and damp-conditions performance?

Zoned And Hybrid

The Diode is – sort of – OR’s answer to the dilemma. It’s a zoned, hybrid jacket that uses pure synthetic PrimaLoft insulation in areas likely to get wet if it rains, your route starts melting, or the snow turns slushy. But covers the core with 750 fill power PrimaLoft Gold Down Blend, which is still water resistant, but has down-like warmth to weight qualities cutting overall bulk and gramme-count.

That’s the theory, but does it work? Sort of. First, the Diode isn’t a super warm, big, fluffy jacket. It’s more of a middleweight thing and a quality pure down jacket of the same 480g weight is, we reckon, warmer and loftier. But, it’s still warmer than an equivalent weight pure synthetic we think.

And it packs decently small too, roughly on a par with the Rab Xenon X which is around 140g lighter. So yes, it’s very portable.

The cut is fantastic in a close-fitting athletic way. Enough chest and shoulder room, but a taped, slim fitting waist that doesn’t leave lots of excess internal space. That also means it sits neatly under a harness if you choose, and the pockets are designed to be harness and waist-belt friendly too.

Talking of which, you also get an internal and external zipped chest pocket. The latter is complete with a mesh pouch for an MP3 player and associated headphone wiring routing. And finally there are two internal, stretch-mesh ‘Shove-It’ pockets for rapid stashing of gloves, hats and the like.

The hood is brilliant too. It fits over a helmet for lightweight belay use. Or can be cinched down top and front to grip a bare or beanied head and move with it. It also incorporates a handy wired peak for a little extra protection. No complaints. You’d be surprised how many down and insulated jackets have a slippy, non-adjustable hood by the way. Not this one.

Diamond Details

All the details are neatly and effectively done. The zip-pulls are properly grippy, hem-cord excess is tucked up out of harm’s way and cuffs are adjusted with classic Velcro. We found they went over or under most gloves we tried. Worth noting as in really bad conditions, you could climb in the Diode thanks to its slick fit. It’s a little sweaty on the move though. But we’d expect that.

‘You can chuck it over a soft shell as a lightweight belay jacket or for lunch-stops. Throw it on around camp, even if it’s grim and drizzly. Or wander down to the pub without fretting’

Finally and crucially, it’s happy getting damp. We’d still throw a shell over it when the ducks properly hit the pond and it chucks it down, but mostly we found we simply treated it like a synthetic jacket.

No paranoia about getting it wet because when that did happen, there was no collapse in loft or catastrophic soggy horror, just the familiar warm but damp vibe we expect from standard PrimaLoft.

That means you can chuck it over a soft shell as a lightweight belay jacket or for lunch-stops. Throw it on around camp, even if it’s grim and drizzly. Or wander down to the pub without fretting when it starts raining on the way home.

And because it packs small and is reasonably, you don’t resent stashing it in your pack in the first place.