Video: What's the Real Difference of Lumen Output on the Trail?
Winter is here in the Northern Hemisphere. Dust off those bike lights and join Christina Chappetta for a rundown on the best brightness and mounting options for your next night ride.
This video is presented by Magicshine
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Since I tried OL, night riding is back to being the hoot it really is. Hangover + Trail Evo FTW.
+1 as well that *both* handlebar and helmet light are essential to night riding with any kind of speed & fluidity. You need a spot on your helmet for "eyes up" scanning trail ahead & sighting through corners, and a bar mounted flood for peripheral & depth perception to track immediate obstacles like branches, trees, & rocks that could cause pedal, bar, or helmet impacts.
It is rare that I look at a product and think this is just awesome quality.
I dont care about fellings, just facts.
So my quastion is do you have both to Tell me that outbound is better?
Is it in every point you made better, on par or worse?
The fine print: I own Outbound Trail EVO, have tested various Lupines & often ride w/ guys who run them.
So we are clear: Lupine wins the "cost is no object" design prize: they are selling $400-$1300 lights built like an S-Class Mercedes. If you use your light every single night, and intend to keep it over the next decade, tech advances be damned, it may be reasonable to spend 2x to 6x as much on a Lupine as an Outbound, assuming Lupine keeps producing replacement parts, batteries, etc for older models.
For everyone else, even those who place just as much weight on longevity as performance, we are talking about consumer electronics that will be dated performance-wise even if the batteries last 5yrs. Gram for gram, and lumen for lumen, my 2yo Trail EVO eats my 3-6yo Niteriders & Gloworms for breakfast performance wise, due to improvements in LED & battery design, even before we add Outbound's superior reflector designs to the equation.
Bottom line comparison to Lupines in the field? Build quality and performance of Outbound's Trail EVO is so good that for my routine use in wooded & rocky grassland settings, you can see as well, ride as fast, and use and abuse it as confidently as a Lupine. I've had comparable crashes w/ my Outbound to those I've witnessed w/ buddies riding Lupines, and outcomes were the same: minor scratches on housings, but no breakage.
Perhaps there are use cases (above treeline, w/ extreme exposure?) where an 8100 lumen Lupine will have a meaningful advantage in being able to see 50+ meters ahead across open terrain. The trails I routinely ride feature grass, trees, rocks, and turns that limit visible trail ahead to less than 30m even in daylight, and at that range I do not perceive an advantage of added lumens. YMMV.
Great company.
Emailed them and had replacement plus new charger in a couple days.
Only issue I have had out of 8 lights from them.
@powturn thank you for this description. I can understand why they are so popular on PB.
Lupine is the whole pakacke for me. I can get rear lights. That sounds dumb for NA. Here in Europe it is common enough that we can get with the bikes to the trails and we will use some roads.
As I am writing this I am in a train with my Enduro to work with lights on the bike to get into the weekend directly from work. It is 6 am, so without lights, nothing would Work.
As for performance, some of them haven't been too bad, but nowhere near the advertised lumens. Same goes for battery life.
Disclaimer: they might have fixed the cable issues since my last purchase, which would remedy the most common issues.
Many manufactures aren't using correct lumen measurements for their product. For example, a T6 LED may have 800 lumens per LED and they add 6 LEDs to a single light for a total of 3600 lumens. That isn't how lumens are measured.The most accurate way to measure is to use a professional lux meter. If you are going to count lumens based on the LED output the rough estimate is that if you have a multi-LED light source, (say two LEDs for this example) both are at 1000 lumen output, combined you will get 1650 lumens not 2000. So stacked LEDs give you 65% brightness, not 100%.
As mentioned by @Someoldfart (I love saying that) soil brightness varies.In the Southwest and Southern California there is a lot of light colored terrain. Lights with focused beams will create hot spots that make it harder to define the terrain. This is where lens shape and how evenly the lens disperses light is important. A helmet mounted light with a narrow beam is the worst because it reflecting the light right back into your eyes. This is where it's important to get a quality light with good beam scatter. Outbound's helmet light does a great job of disbursing light. It's also low profile so you don't look like a Telitubbie and catch your light on a low branch.
Additionally, the lower you mount your light on the bike the more definition you get from the trail. This is good until it's too low and you are casting shadows on the trail from the vegetation or ruts.
I always ride with bar mounted light and a helmet mounted light. Sometimes I have a spare 800 lumen Nightrider light in my bag as a backup incase a battery dies. The helmet light is important for tight turns like switchbacks and great for spotting that rustling sound in the bushes, because we all know that rustling is either a bear, mountain lion or snake. (Maybe an alligator in Florida).
Gotta say lights are just getting better all the time. When we started night riding out on the UBC trails in the early 80s it was sidewall generators and I dunno, 20 lumens? Pretty silly. Smart people mounted the generator on the front wheel because a skid would turn the light off.
Advertised lumens is the average rating from the first three minutes the light is turned on. Beyond that it could drop down to 10 lumens and you can still rate it as 12000 lumens per FL1 standards.
www.outboundlighting.com/blogs/bike-lights/simple-math-bogus-lumen-numbers-can-proven
One Niterider Lumina 1800 and a Micro 900 if you ride solo.
Keep it simple if you don't do 2+hr night rides
Another point that I've noticed over the years, and rant abut over and over, is that if you have a lot of light in close (i.e. a strong flood on the bar), your eyes grow accustomed to that level of light. Because of that, you need your helmet light to be much more powerful, to provide the same level of illumination at a greater distance as what's up close. Personally, I run my bar light on low and aim it to the middle of where I'm looking, or slightly higher. It's there mostly to provide contrast for the helmet light, and a little peripheral information. I run my helmet light on medium most of the time, aimed at the top half of where I'm looking. I prefer a good strong spot with good throw. I kick it up to high for the descents. This approach has served me well over the last 15 years...
www.olightstore.com/bfl1800
And here is the sleeper night-day light: www.sofirnlight.com/products/sofirn-q8pro-powerful-11000-lumen-with-4-cree-xhp50-2-leds-anduril-2
Currently $64 with batteries! Look up the reviews, this thing is unbelievable in build quality, light quality, run time, and price. Only problem is weight. Currently working on a mod to have batteries connected by wire, someone else already did a rudimentary job: www.mtbr.com/threads/blf-q8-on-the-bars-5-000-lumen-monster-bar-light.1059529/page-3#lg=thread-1059529&slide=5
Works great!
battery pack box from ebay and 4 original Panasonic li ion 18650 batterys, everything together was around 70€.
Works like a charm, on full blast it's around 2,5h run time, nice warm tint and a lot of flood on the beam.
That, and bar lights really need a super wide beam so you don’t lose the trail when you countersteer into a corner or even just get offline a bit, covering a wider field of view at similar intensity means you need more lumens/power to do that, whereas a helmet light can be a bit narrower beam since you control where it’s pointed, meaning it can use less power, which means less battery, and less weight on your head/neck where you actually feel it.
There’s always exceptions, if you’re riding big jump lines where the terrain is buff and you need to see into big gaps, helmet light is king, for sure, because depth doesn’t matter and your bar light doesn’t help as much. If you’re in the desert, it’s so wide open but super rocky, you can get away with just the bar light and no helmet light, to better read the trail. Horses for courses.
Uranus Fire 501B 1 LED Portable Flashlight a.co/d/1tHGbmp
Am I the only one in thinking we should leave nature and wildlife alone at night? You know, to "do their thing" and to "recharge" so to speak, as we disturb them during the day enough already. *shrugs*
Someday I’ll get there.
Until then I’ll continue to record my sub-bumbling skill riding, but just won’t be posting it to the internet, for fear of being mocked.