Originally Posted by RonH
I have a friend and fellow bike commuter who works at bike shop and he told me about
this light. He has two of them on his bike and said a friend followed him home in a car and said he was very visible and the lights were very bright.
I looked at them yesterday and they are bright but it seems to me that the viewing angle has to be just right to be considered "bright". If a motorist is off to the side just a little, the light doesn't seem as bright as most other LED lights.
What do you think? Should I replace my double Vistalite Nebula 5 setup that I've had since 2001?
The light your friend has will have problems as it gets older. The thing will shut off when he goes over a sharp bump. This is because the springs and the contacts for the batteries will wear. Shimming or wrapping the batteries with a 1/2 wide piece of inner tube will help keep the batteries from sliding away from the contacts on a bump. If the lights are brand new he may not have a problem until he gets some miles on them. They are so small and bright that it's worth the trouble to me to shim the batteries to try and keep the lights working, when they work it's great.
Those Vista lights are outdated technology now. The new LED's and the new lights with lenses over them are so much brighter than those, there is no reason to buy Vista lights any more.
One Cateye TL-LD 1000 light will be much, much, brighter than two of those and much, much better from the side and even from 45 degrees away from straight forward.
It really is much safer from the side and from close to the front than the Vista lights. The cateye has two LED's on each side, and a good red lens.