Looks like the STW office is having an early finish today, getting the fresh goods article up before 10am

For those that only see the forum, & not the rest of the site, a quick LINKY

so the Gemini lights…
£190 for a triple XML, you can get the Fluxient version of this on ebay for £140.. so your are paying a margin for a local distributer.. OK

£150 for a single XML led unit.. this is pushing the margin factor a tad far…

£105 for a fricken standard XML torch…

Though if your thinking thats not that bad, you obviously missed Stoner’s cheap and cheerful XML torch review…
Talk about Gemini having a laugh.

I bought one of those torches around the same time as Stoner wrote his review. Whilst it’s amazing VFM and extremely bright, it also stops working when vibration reaches a critical level (say, offroad ). I’d rather pay more to get something which won’t let me down halfway through a woodland path at night time.

£80 more? 5 times the price?

I didn’t get one of those XML units, as I already had two P7 LED torches (from 4 years ago) that gave me sterling service on the bike & are still in use as normal torches. At least one is put in the bag during the winter as backup. I’d suggest you could probably fix the vibration issue if you looked into it…

I am sure you can name a variety of Super-expensive MTB components
that do the same job as their much cheaper alternatives.

it also stops working when vibration reaches a critical level (say, offroad ).

Never happened to me, but you should be able to fix it by wrapping the battery in a strip of paper or stretching the contact spring a little. All that’s happening is the battery is losing contact either front or back and so turning off. Just make it so the battery is less likely to rattle of one of it’s contacts.

I also bought one of those lights following the Stoner review. I find that it’s not the battery connection which is iffy but the contacts within the switch. So hit a bump or two and you could end up in S.O.S mode 😉

Still a great light though 🙂

Business is all about making money ie cost of sale – (manufactureing/marketing/sales) cost = profit margin.

Lower profit margins and therefore cheaper things are often but not always offset by lower quality.

You takes your choice…..

Talk about Gemini having a laugh.

Not really when you compare them to other “bike lights.”

Since the introduction of the cheap Chinese offerings, we’ve come to expect a heck of a lot for not much money it would seem. Not a problem in itself, it’s a good thing as competition is healthy within the marketplace.

BUT… The largest costs of making and selling a bike light, are not the individual components required to make it, or the transport/logistics to get it from the factory to shop to customer (as it’s so small and light). The largest costs involved in something like a Bike Light are those of R&D and then to a lesser extent marketing. That is to say when you make 100,000 of a unit, you can bung it out the door at £30 a pop and still make a few quid profit off each one, but if you drop it down to a production run of only 1,000 you’d probably have to charge 3 or 4 times the price for it to cover the costs, and then you’ve got to put more effort (and hence cost) into marketing and promotion as it doesn’t immediately sell itself due to being much higher priced.

I’m not familiar with those Gemini lights, but whilst they don’t look as well made as say an Exposure or a Troutielight, they do look to be better made and a better design than the cheap Chinese offerings, which itself will also bump the price up slightly.

So on balance, no I don’t think they’re extortionate. On a Lumens/£ ratio, they’re a heck of a lot better than anything you could buy even just 3 or 4 years ago, and if they are significantly better quality than the cheap Chinese jobs, then they should sell OK. People also forget that it’s not just the amount of Lumens that matter. Without exception, every cheap light I’ve ever tried has had a large hotspot, and then a much dimmer halo, which I find offputting whilst riding. I like a broad flood of light, with no obvious hot spot, and as such have paid for the privilege.

It’s nice to be able to choose your price point though, and have products that do a job at the very budget end of the scale, but also products at the top end that push technology forwards…

Now what boils my piss, and makes me wince “how much” is LBS’s charging £6 an inner tube, especially as I’ve worked in the trade in the past myself and know roughly how much they pay per tube in bulk…