Our pick of this year’s best bar-mounted lights, from Exposure, Hope and XML, are featured in Issue 70 (out now!). The full test of ten lights is included below along with headless Dave’s video talkthrough of each light in action:
http://vimeo.com/33213668
After what always seems like a long, endless summer of night rides that last well into the evening without the need of artificial illumination, along comes autumn and with it the sudden rush to dust off and charge up the bike lights or shop around for some new ones. Lighting technology seems to be an arms race that shows no sign of slowing at the moment, with each successive year upping both lumen count and battery burn time. It’s hard to keep up and easy to find yourself riding in the shadow of someone who’s got this year’s model or having to head home squinting into the dying flickers of your fading battery, while others keep on riding.
Night riding, like mountain biking in general, means different things to different folk. For some, it’s all about the sense of adventure; a different experience to riding during daylight hours, where length of burn time is more important than floodlighting the trail ahead. For others, maximum wattage is required to create daytime conditions that compensate for the lack of opportunities to ride during the day. Everyone is somewhere on the spectrum that exists between these two extremes and for that reason, there is no one light that meets everybody’s needs.
Here’s our advice. First, work out what you need from a light. Then work out your budget, choose whether you want a self-contained unit or separate lamp and battery, and then dive on into our lights test to see what best fits your needs.
You can browse through each light in turn or alternatively follow the links to find a light directly..
Lumicycle LED3 XPG ATL Elite26
Review Info
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If you are going to set your videos as viewable only when embedded, could you at least make the video as large as possible? Ta.
It looks OK on my 23in screen. Yes it’s compressed, but this is the version that will appear in the digital issue, so we’re not promising HD. It’s not like you can’t see close up pictures of the lights on the internets, though this does help you see relative sizes and so on.
Thank’s Chipps & ‘headless’ Dave for an excellent review.
View it on an iPad and you can maximise it full screen 🙂
maxipad
stated as a little restrictive for fast riding off road, would it work well as a helmet light?
sorry, was refering to the lezyne light.
it works very well as a helmet light, proper mount isn’t out yet AFAIK but zip ties work OK – comparable to a joystick regarding output but does’t have the joysticks tech features
What Hilldodger said^^
i got one of these for Xmas and it included the helmet mount, just so you know.
sorry, didn’t realise these comments went on every page! i meant i got one of the XML lights.
Check out the Moon X Power 1500 lumens, great value from Wiggle for £120. just got mine today. Quality looks good too!
Hi, nice little reviews to the point as ever..a bit disappointed that you didn’t include the Ay-Up’s tho..any particular reason why they (Ay-Ups) were not tested?