Since the (literally!) dark days of the 90’s, when you could spend hundreds of pounds on halogen lights with lead acid batteries, things have moved on a lot for night riding. Nowadays riders are spoilt for choice, with everything from £700 brand-name lights down to drop-shipped lights from Asia that cost the same as a few rounds of beer.
One thing seems largely absent now though: For a brief period around 2008, there seemed to be a heyday of people making home made LED lights. What happened to them? Well, partly at least, they’ve moved on to bigger, brighter things. The UK’s own irrepressible PhotonicInduction took it to extremes in 2013, and below is Daniel Riley this week posting a ridiculous LED-array that puts out an estimated 90,000 lumens:
No video showing? Here’s a link.
(Kudos for the aerial beam shots in this video: Quite literally going above and beyond compared to most).
As Daniel says in the video, this thing outshines the full-beam on his car, and will light up clouds or entire mountainsides. He also states that it’s actually too bright to usefully light anything close by. The above is what’s now within range of an enthusiastic DIYer armed with some hand tools and a bit of electronics knowhow. To just make something bright enough to put on your bars and ride trails though? It’s not that expensive. LED technology has been pushing brightness up and power consumption down for a long time. Better LEDs are still put on the market by electronics manufacturers every few years, but the fact is we’ve had ones that have been bright enough and run long enough for quite a while now.
The parts and datasheets are out there for anyone who wants to try their hand with a soldering iron. LED cheapness and efficiency mean a lot of companies are building at scale though, and mountain bike lights are effectively a solved problem. Lumens for bike lights are increasingly like megapixels for cameras: Beyond a certain upper range, pushing the number further becomes meaningless for most applications (We’re currently testing a 6000 lumen Cateye light). From now on, you can expect lights to go in two directions: Fancier, and cheaper.
You can see this with branded lights now trying to differentiate themselves on features. Beyond high reliability and after-sales service, some are far more fully featured than cheaper lights, for instance shipping with wireless remotes, or sensors that automatically brighten the light when they detect you’ve started a descent.
We ran a lights test in issue 101, but it was to the chagrin of some that the cheapest light we tested was £55. Why didn’t we test a £20 light?
It’s not that we or our various correspondents have never tried anything cheaper, but here’s what we’ve found from various bright bike lights and torches that come with tiny price tags. Firstly, there’s an incredibly high turnover of product models at low price points. Without a brand backing them up, and so much product cloning going on (Even mid-range brands like MTB Batteries have been hit with this and have to put notes out about how to identify genuine products), and no guarantees of quality assurance, it’s difficult to pin down a product that’s going to remain consistent or available at all. Many cheap lights are generic housings with various brands slapped on the outside, and it’s difficult if not impossible to trace their provenance.
Amongst those cheap lights some, but not all, have dodgy batteries, bad drivers, unreliable waterproofing, or unsafe chargers. Even across samples of a single model, those things can be wildly inconsistent. The real world consequences range from a light slowly getting dimmer, to a light suddenly failing altogether on the trail, or a charger starting a fire at home (as experienced by one of our forum members). Some people will write this off as scaremongering in the service of advertisers, but the fact is this is our actual experience of the cheapest lights. Not all of them are bad, but a noticeable proportion are, and that’s a big enough risk that any buyer should be aware of it. Finding something good at that price point involves expecting failures and managing risks, something firmly in the realm of tinkerers rather than reviewers or consumers.
Tinkering, DIY and experimentation still have a place in mountain biking. After all, entire companies sometimes emerge from it, and much of the technology we ride now wouldn’t be here were it not for people making stuff in their garages. That should never be mistaken for a thoroughly tested product though, with comprehensive QA and warranty procedures backed up by manufacturers and distributors. Outside of those frameworks, bask in as many cheap lumens as you like, but carry some kind of backup and be prepared for the worst.
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Good article this – exactly what I was suggesting you should be writing about in the thread – addressing the situation rather than just ignoring it 🙂
As a follow up though, it’d have been interesting to take a sample of the cheapy lights and see how reliable they actually are by getting your test team to use them and report back. Or just dismantle some of them and report back like this:
http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and-why-you.html
Though I’ll accept that that’s maybe somewhat outside the bounds of mtb journalism but I’d bet there’d be someone on the forum with the right skills willing to do it.