2manybikes

Who has one? How long have you had it?

trekmogul 

I have the Lupine Betty Six and used about 150 hours..

seeker333

I don't have one. However, here are links to a reputable light tester:

https://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...1#post15069730

JohnJ80

I've had one since they first came out in Oct - got one of the first ones. It's awesome. You really don't need another light but I have a Piko on the helmet to get the attention of drivers at cross streets.

And, just because I could, I put my older Wilma (1500 lumens) on my helmet and rode with the Wilma 6 (2400) on the bars for a total of 3900 lumens. Practically burned the road clean when they were both on.

J.

2manybikes

I've had mine less than a month. Of course it's almost perfect. I've owned a 900 lumen Lupine Edison 10 for maybe 10 years, I can't remember ?? The battery still works fine on low, but high kills it very fast. (Not bad for a 9 or 10 yr old Li-Ion.) It was way ahead of anything in those days.

The better charger (charger one) from The Edison 10 works on the new Wilma too. Lupine told me it's better than the Wiesel charger that came with my Wilma.
Ten years and the new components fit the old ones !! I can see the ground well enough with a car coming at me in the other lane on the Wilma setting that goes over five hours. I have been finishing 50-100 mile rides in the dark every week. I did ride it over five hours once. On fast down hills I used higher power a little and it still went five hours.

I found a path with a fast downhill and a double curve at the same time. I tired high just to see what would happen. I could see through the leafless trees well enough to see if any one was around the corner before I got there.

If I went camping I could probably use the light to make toast.

Burton

So how about some beam shots guys .... pretty please?

agent pombero

Nice! I hope one day my wallet can support my dream of running so many lumens

JohnJ80

Beamshots with a light this bright are completely useless (actually, any light over about 400 lumens).

J.

2manybikes

OK. I'm breaking in my new studded tires tomorrow. It will be dark by then.

Burton

And why is that exactly?

Burton

Just a shot with an iPhone will be cool! I'm really mostly interested in the beamspread.

2manybikes

This is the best spread and throw of any of the dozens of lights I have used in 20 years. At first it seems like to much light close to the bike on the ground. I thought it was aimed down too much. But it has the power to throw as far as you can identify something far ahead. The spread is huge. It is great for off road at high power.
Unless you have used something this bright it's hard to imagine. I use mine mostly for the road. I can see straight ahead and scan the ground just like in the day.

There's a couple of problems with beam shots. Using a camera on automatic the settings change as the light changes. Learning to do a control shot in the dark and the same settings for the beam is tricky. Also if I have two lights, you could tell if one of mine is better, but, that does not tell you anything about comparisons to another persons beam shots posted here, because of all the variables.

The best thing is to go to Gretna bikes. The american distributor for Lupine. If you look around you can find a link to the beam shot comparison photos done by lupine.
They do it right and publish the camera settings. It's a lot of work. You may get to the German Lupine pages (made in Germany). But Google and maybe other browsers will translate for you. Honestly, this is better than what I can do. I'm going to post this and then go look for the link. Some of the better light manufactureres are now doing this.
. Be patient and look at lots of their photos, they have makers sitting on the ground for distance measurement and other important info.

Lupine Wilma 6 (Wilma 6 - 9 - or 12 are just different batteries for longer run times, the beams are the same). Read about how they measure lumens too.

This is the most realistic photos you will find --- https://www.lupine2013.de/dimmlevels/dual click around on different things somewhere it gives the distances of the markers on the ground. Some of it is German but just look around anyway.

seeker333

https://reviews.mtbr.com/2013-bike-li...rd-beam-photos

JohnJ80

Because digital cameras (and film cameras but to a somewhat lesser degree) do not have the dynamic range from bright to dark to accurately portray the beam. Most lights will look much more spot light like than they really are. Your eye can see about 21 f-stops (doublings) of light. A camera can see 6-8 at best. In order to give you something that makes sense when you look at the picture, the camera or image processing software will compress those 21 f-stops of light into 6-8 losing tons of detail on the beam. (F-stop is the measure of the aperture of a camera's lens and each increasingly higher number of aperture represents 1/2 of the light from the previous aperture).

Lights this bright have a very bright center of the beam and the fall off of light in the spill from the hot spot is what suffers in the beamshots. Therefore, they don't come anywhere near to accurately representing what you see when you actually have the light. The center spot is probably accurate, but the spill is not. Spill is hugely important to anyone riding a bike and needing a light.

You'll notice this in the Mtbr beam shots mentioned above. Go up massively in lumens and you will see not as dramatic of a change in the light beam. I have lights that go from 120 lumens (400, 600,750, 800, 1200, 1500, 2400) to 3900 lumens and have taken beam shots of them all and it's apparent when I look at the light with naked eyes and the resulting camera images. We'd be much better off with a plot of lux readings across the beam and from beam center. You can think of lux as lumens per square area and Lumens are basically the total light output without regard to beam or spread.

J.

Burton

I understand what you're saying and since I'm not particularly interested in a light with a huge hotspot - can't see how beam shots would be useless. They'd definately show that. I'm also completely unimpressed with the beamshots coming out of MTBR - they're ALL grossly overexposed. I agree with the idea of 'standards' but the 'standard' exposure they use is only so some of the totally underpowered entry level lights they review don't look like the complete waste of money they actually are.

Burton

I think there are a few differet versions, differing in coverage angles - which one did you get? I've used high powered lights - most seem to have more reach than is practical for a bicycle (in terms of possibly overdriving a headlight) and have circular beam patterns rather than a shaped output. That makes them well suited to off-road use but I'd expect you'd really have to tone things down using it on a commuter.

2manybikes

I have the 26 degree lens. It's good for commuting, and road use. Plenty of light where you want it, on the ground and enough far ahead.
To see very far ahead for some reason just select a higher setting.
I did not buy this light for the 2400 lumen output. I bought mine for the 5 hour 45 min run time on 850 lumens. I also use the 4 hr 1100 lumen to see way ahead or on a fast downhill. I still have the 2hr 50 min 1400 lumen, and the 1 hr 30 min 2400 lumen settings in my program. Way too much for oncoming traffic in my opinion. Part of my rides start and end on a paved off road path, so I can experiment with high settings.
There are ten settings, one can program any four to ride with.

Burton

Actually 2many bikes - that makes perfect sense! Since light intensity is proportional to the square of the distance, with the same reflector, you'd need 4x the output to double the reach and 9x to triple it. That would be equivalent to stepping from 400 lumens to 1,600 to 3,600 lumens.

Nice to hear you're happy with the light - a 4hr plus runtime must be really nice!

2manybikes

I like to have an hour more than I really need for a ride, just in case. Changing a flat in dark 20F weather is slow and a real pain. I need to take my gloves off the fix the flat, and then put them back on to get them warm again. And then off ............etc. Having a good light means you can leave the light on the bike, and, just lay the bike down, to get light to fix a flat.

Snow tomorrow afternoon. I'll be riding in the snow in the dark. Maybe in a downpour with the ground wet and traffic coming at you in the other lane the high setting would be useful **********?

Burton

Bare wet pavement does tend to suck up lumens and thats one reason I went for a higher output myself, but you'll likely have to dip the beam for oncoming traffic - pretty much like a car. Best way to check is to turn on the light and check by walking ahead of it a good 50 to 100 ft and checking the glare factor from a side distance equivalent to where traffic would be in the other lane.

seeker333

Excellent explanation of the technical difficulty of portraying "beam shots" accurately.

Burton

LOL So since we can all agree it's a challenge - it should be straight forward to also agree that none of the beam shots posted on sites like MTBR are accurate or representative either.

But what they CAN do is show one beam shot relative to another taken at the same settings for comparisons of beam spread, hot spots and overall light distribution. Regardless of limitations, its pretty easy to see differences between a 10 degree beam vs a 35 degree beam. There's a big difference between something being not completely accurate and totally useless.

agent pombero

Wow, a lot of good info here! Thank you 2manybikes and JohnJ80 for sharing.

2manybikes

It's nice to have someone to share it with that is interested, and, understands.

BTW - light is super in a blizzard (Saturday) just a few flakes when leaving home, 4" of wet snow by the time I got home. About five hours mostly in 2-4" on snow. Whew!

JohnJ80

I don't think you understood what I was saying at all and I don't think you understand the technology.

Where you will fail to get the benefit of the beamshot is in the spill not in the hot spot. In other words, what I think you are most interested in (the area that is not the hotspot) is where digital photographs of the beam shot will fall down the most.

The reason they are overexposed is because they are trying to show the spill. If you expose for the beam center (hot spot) you won't see any of the spill because it's far outside the dynamic range of the digital camera. If you expose for the spill, you will see more characteristics of the spill at the risk of the overexposed center. There is no way to get an exposure at the level of these bright lights (I suggest that would be lights over 400 lumens) and have a perfectly exposed photograph from edge of spill to the center of the beam. The camera is trying to compress 2^21 levels into 2^8 (all approximate but you get the idea) levels. If you were to expose for the edge of the spill, the camera can only go up 2^8 levels from that. If you expose for the beam center, the camera can only go down 2^8 levels (doublings/halvings of light) from that point. You eye can see 2^21 levels which is what you really want to know because that's what you will need when you ride.

Simply, what you missed is that going from the severe bright to the dim edge of the spill far exceeds the capacity of virtually any digital camera today and almost all film cameras as well. That's why the beam shots are not particularly representative of what you see when you ride.

J.