Originally Posted by
Aardwolf
I'm finding it quite difficult to compare lights.
My current scheme is to put them 6" apart and back off 50 feet.
There's probably a way of using neutral density filters and making a video so see which is the last to be visible.
Or maybe just dark glasses.
I look at the lights from about a 100 yards away during daytime hours to see how bright they are. I do not compare lumens, I just look at them.
I also look at the light beam inside the garage when it shines on the garage door or wall to see if it is a tightly focused beam, putting all the light in a small area or not. The plain Superflash has a tight beam, so I make sure that I have them well aimed straight back from the bike. But as I noted earlier, the Superflash 65 has a wider beam so I use that when on winding roads.
A tightly focused beam that is well aimed does not need very many lumens.
A friend of mine wanted a really bright taillight for bike touring about a decade ago. He bought the one that had the most lumens, was USB rechargeable And he was really disappointed that it only ran about five hours on the bright flash mode. On a bike tour you usually are riding more than five hours a day. I have had some 14 hour days.
On a bike tour, I recharge the batteries in my taillight flashers once a week, even if they still look bright. They might look bright when only a few feet from your eyes, but once the batteries start getting low they are dimmer from a distance.
Ikea used to make some AAA rechargeable NiMH batteries that were rated at 900 milliamps, but they no longer sell them. Now the highest rated AAA they have are 750 milliamps. I use the 900 ones in my taillights on a bike tour.