Has anyone previously used a 1000 lumen set up and gone to a B+M 80 lux road-specific system? How do they compare?
The only real comparison I’ve done is when I had my Cyo 60 and was riding alongside someone who had a Toro (not sure which version, but this was in 2012). We agreed the Cyo was broadly equivalent to the Toro on medium in simplistic terms of how much it was illuminating the tarmac.
The Cyo Premium takes it up to 80 lux, which isn’t a huge jump (it doesn’t work linearly) but more importantly the IQ2 reflectors have much wider spread, so it’s much improved at medium speeds and in poor conditions.
Top-end battery lights vomit out far more photons, there’s no question, but the issue with the scattergun approach isn’t just about chucking half the light at the owls in the threes and the retinas in the oncoming drivers, it’s also about how the tarmac is illuminated.
The conical beam and the angle of the road interact: the further you throw a given quantity of light, the lower the proportion of it you find in your eyeball. So conical beams always end up with hotspots in either the near or middle distance depending on how you angle them. The German style beams, however, give much more even apparent illumination. Your eyes adjust to the level of available light as far as possible, so this evenness of illumination can be as important as the simple amount of light being chucked around the place. If your eyes are dealing with a hotspot in the middle distance, they’re going to struggle a little with the far distance that you’re concentrating on at speed.
You just can’t give an objective comparison of beams that are so ideologically different. There’s a lot of cognitive business going on, it’s not just physics.
