Originally Posted by
veganbikes
In the end I want a light with a good beam pattern with a proper cut off so I don't blind people. A lot of light manufacturers are focused more on bringing us a bicycle specific flashlight that is just brighter and brighter when we really need to work on good bright enough lights that are more visible and allow us to see but also crucially not just be an annoyance that really doesn't help.
I get people love a clean mounting but honestly meh, would rather have a better light then cleaner mounting function of aesthetics in this case because the function is safety.
I recently bought the
Ravemen CR1000, which has a shaped (cutoff) beam pattern. It's not StVZO compliant, but the same idea that you describe. It's a nice light at a very low price. The lens, at the very front of the light, is held in place by a retaining ring -- which, when loosened, allows the lens to be rotated 180 degrees in order to use the light under the handlebar (and still have the cutoff where it belongs). The standard mount allows the light to be run in this orientation, or
it can be purchased with this mount in order to run it under a computer that has a go pro mount on the underside. I've done it both ways (with my own go pro mount on different bikes) and it works well.
It's 1,000 lumens which is less than the OP desires -- but when all of the lumens are focused where you're actually riding (versus having some of the light go up into the sky), that's more than sufficient. And after testing it out, I found that the light's battery life is significantly longer than claimed -- mine gets almost three hours on the highest setting.