Lupine were another company at Eurobike making incremental improvements to their range, in contrast to the complete new lineup they revealed two years ago. They did show a couple of completely new lights though.
One new lamp is the Blika headlamp, which is not just a helmet light, but aimed at everything from mountain biking, to climbing, caving, fishing, camping, skiing, and all kinds of other activities. The mounting system means it can run as a helmet light or head torch, using either a strap or 3M stick on mounts.
It comes in one of three versions, all using the same head unit. Pictured above is the Blika R7, which comes with a 6.6Ah battery plus remote. Other versions come with a 3.3Ah battery half the size, the
(* in fairness, there were torrential rainstorms at Eurobike, hanging over halls that depend heavily on daylight, pushing those of us taking photos well into 4-digit ISO numbers for hefty chunks of the show).
Of course, because it has Bluetooth, you can also control it with an app from your phone, like nearly everything these days. The 6.6Ah battery weights 245g, and the light itself 85g. Light output is 2100 lumens max, with various modes including diffuse/dim for close work or reading, a togglable spotlight for activities such as riding, and green or red light modes for romping around at night with your low light vision intact, feeling just like one-a-them army men. The fancier of the batteries have small red tail lights and can be mounted on your helmet too, so no cable wrangling when you want to put your pack on or take it off.
The Blika is also completely waterproof, and shockproof to drops of up to 2 metres. You can read more about the Blika here.
Another completely new light they were showing was this 6,500 lumen handlebar light, the Alpha R 14. It’s so new their signage said “November 2017” and there’s no information on their website yet:
Sure enough, the specs listed a 13.2Ah battery. Interestingly, unlike many light manufacturers Lupine list exactly the LEDs they have in each light. The Alpha R14 has 8 XM-L 2 LEDs (a power efficient mainstay of light design for some years now), and 8 of the latest XQ-E HI LEDs. I’ll leave you with Cree’s datasheets over there if you want to get really nerdy, but with 16 LEDs and 6500 lumens of output, it implies the light is running them quite kindly rather than at full power, which would extend service life of the light.
Lupine seem to have released no more information on the Alpha R 14, but we’ll let you know more as soon as we hear.
