Also of interest to me at Eurobike was the brakes that people were putting with the new 7900 & 6700 brake levers. Shimano's new levers have a "Servo Wave" design, which makes the cable pull different from the previous Shimano road brake levers (I believe the new 5700 levers are also Servo Wave). I started a thread about this last year, but it didn't get much response, so I was interested to see what different manufacturers were doing. Santana and Massi are both using these levers with V-brakes and without travel agents (see photos in previous post), which suggests that they pull the same cable as a modern MTB lever does. On other stands, these levers were being used with mini-Vs, with the road version of the Avid BB7, with standard cantilever brakes (with what appeared to be pretty standard length straddle cables), with Shimano's new road caliper brakes that are designed for these levers, and with other road caliper brakes that are not specifically designed for these levers. Therefore, my only conclusion was that the new levers could be used with any type of brake (I think the only combination that I didn't see was the new levers with the MTB version of a cable disc brake, like the BB7)!

I tried to ask some people about some of these lever and brake combinations - the guys at Santana said they work very well with V-brakes without travel agents, and the guys at the stand that had them paired with mini-Vs didn't really understand my question but assured me that they were compatible and worked fine. I then learned that it was rarely useful to ask such technical questions to most of the guys working on the stands, who were mostly only sales people.