Now that this thread got bumped and I reread parts of it --
Originally Posted by
cyccommute
Climbing on a mountain bike off-road may or may not be fast enough to keep the wheel turning at the proper rate. And if you have to stop to walk over an obstacle, you might be walking sections of the trail in the dark. [A generator-driven light system] is not the best fit which is why battery systems are so prevalent
I'm not so sure that offroad nighttime biking is as prevalent as we're being led to believe, particularly by accessory manufacturers. Some of us ride like that, of course, but not very many overall.
Battery systems are indeed the best fit for slow, technical riding, especially if you can add one to your helmet so you're not stuck with only seeing wherever your front wheel is pointed. I just think that feeding them on a charger gets to be enough of an annoyance to make me prefer dyno systems whenever possible.
The last straw for me came with the AA-powered Dinotte lights that I got a few years ago. Damned bright, front and back, but if I didn't stick the batteries in the charger overnight at least once every two days,
especially in cold winter weather, I learned to expect that they'd drop to low-power mode even on my relatively short commute. Going out for a two-hour ride after dark was no longer a spur-of-the-moment thing because I had to either put the batteries in the charger that morning or always have a second set on standby. I'm positive that run times would be less of a problem with the Li-ion systems, but still, my Dinottes started gathering dust the day I got my dynohub-equipped city bike. I really should either sell them off or send them in for an upgrade to a single Li-ion setup.