Could be. But another reason is the size of your "light source". For a light source to be noticed, its size is even more important than its brightness. And for a given brightness, the larger the source, the more it will attract attention. Unfortunately, most bike lights sold in North America use very tiny light sources. When seen from far away, two or three light heads look like a bigger light source.

I do not want over powered lights, I just want parity or equality with the other road users. Please, do not tell me cars and trucks need 50 to 100 watts of lights because they are going much faster, in most night traffic here I am as fast as they are. Federal and state headlight standards call for light levels and beam patterns for good reasons. If there was not such a weight penalty I expect many of you would want lights like mine. I just use a head-light designed for night off-road racing or small aircraft landing lights.

Without sounding borish; are you saying that you can ride as fast as cars on a freeway or a country highway where the speed limit is at least 55? That's what the brighter lights on cars are for. Even in the city where cars routinely are running speed limits of 45 (and often exceeding that) you can't ride that fast either!

Obviously if your in tight traffic in the city your probably going to be able to keep up with cars or at least catch them at the next light, but at those speeds the brighter lights on cars are not helping them really to see all that much better far down the road, their there more to be seen by others. In the city you'll find cars all the time either not realizing their lights are off, running just the daytime running lights, or they just turn on their parking lights and see just fine because of all the street lights...although this is not a legal thing to do.

If I was wrong about all this bicycling light thing then the laws would have been written years ago that all cyclists would have to have lights as bright as cars dim lights; obviously this isn't the case because the speeds on bikes are not as great on cars thus the laws are not as strict.

This is absolutely correct and is what I've been saying for years on this forum. It's also why I use a front amber flasher because I know the limitations of the size of bicycle lights and the need to attract attention to me, and that's where the flasher comes in.

The "reference point" is a really good reason to run two headlights. It's been noted elsewhere, especially about motorcycles, that it's easier for onlookers to judge distance & speed if they see paired or multiple lights on another vehicle.

Check out what Honda put together regarding motorcycle safety enhancements:
http://world.honda.com/HDTV/ASV/ASV-3-motor/index.html

They mention some figures, such as causes of car-motorcycle crashes (35% due to overlooking, and 35% to perception of distance between vehicles). Their prototype also has twin headlights and a high-mounted front light (plus fork lights), similar to a bicyclist with two headlights and a helmet light.

Any set-up is fine until you have a close call (or worse). Me? I look like a freakin' Christmas tree. I bet they've never seen one of those on the road before.

I eventually turned into a Christmas tree over the last 3 years. I now use the Cygolite Metro with a amber flasher and a helmet light; along with 3 Cateye LD600's and my new Bell Metro helmet has a red flasher in it along with barend lights.

I think I'm done!

Good info BarracksSi. When people mention their bike lights make them look like motorcycles, my reaction from 20+ years of riding the motor driven beasts is: "Cars don't see me on my motorcycle".

So is the OP going to reply to any of these responses or was he just trolling in the first place?

I live in Austin, Tx. The other day I saw someone riding thru town with some strange, new kind of rear lighting system. The orange LED lights were part of a strap-like set up that went on his Camelbak. It was not totally dark yet, but it looked like it could be removed, and put on a different pack pretty easily. MAN....It was bright! We could see for a good 1/2 mile ahead of us before we caught up to him on the road. We asked him want it was, and he said that it was new; and he'd gotten it off the internet.
DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT THAT WAS THAT I SAW? Where can I find one for myself? I've gotta get one. Any help is appreciated.

I've run a similar setup. The luminous efficacy of an MR16 is 12 to 15 lumens/watt. That makes an MR16 300 lumens max.

You are off by a factor of over 2 in the efficiency of the MR16. At nominal voltage (12V), an MR16 puts out around 40 lumens/W. At 20% overvoltage, it puts out up to 70 lm/W. Follow acroy's link.

Exactly. Listening to people opposed to bright lights deriding people for them is like listening to fixed-gear fanatics bemoaning derailleurs. It gets tiresome.

You are forgetting some aspect between car/bike - namely the size of the tire and lack of shocks. Because of its larger size tires and cushion/shock, when driving car, you don't have to worry about small rock, patch of sand and/or tiny potholes. When you are riding 20-25mph on 700c/28 bicycle tire, those little thing becomes a very big things - and you want to make sure you have a light that could point those out!!!

Just think about it - do you care how bright your headlight is on your car? Yes to a degree, but you are well protected and as long as you can see the road, you don't really care. On a bike, you want every advantage you can get/afford.

YES, because being able to see stuff at 70 mph is a significant part of safety. And potholes still suck in a car.

"NLPIP tested several MR16 samples to determine their efficacy. Efficacies ranged from 12 to 15 lumens per watt."

http://www.lrc.rpi.edu/programs/nlpi...erformance.asp

I guess it's case of YMMV.

Reading through the NLPIP stuff and finding some other items, we may be looking at two different measurements with the same units. Efficiency and efficancies are confusing and used confusingly. I'm not sure where Steven M. Scharf got his numbers from and it looks like he just divided the lumen output by the wattage to get some of his numbers. He is an electrical engineer so I assume that what he is doing is valid.

From the standpoint of results (I don't have the equipment to measure lumens but I do have eyes:rolleyes:), overvolting certainly does what Scharf says it does. Overvolted MR16 are much brighter than equivalent MR11 lamps and certainly rival...or exceed...HID for light output.

Hopefully OLED lights will become practical over the next 5 years or so. Over 70 lumens per watt...

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008...-princeton.php

I finally found it! A local rider was wearing one...so I asked him where he got it. It turns out the lights are still in pre-production so webs sales was my only option. It is called the FlashBak Lighting System. I have attached it to my Camelback when riding, and my summit pack when I was hiking. I think this thing will attach to anything. Pretty cool, and very bright! It has a remote switch that hangs over your sholder so you can power it on or off without taking off your pack. The remote switch also lights up when the back-lights are on, so you know that you are illuminated. Pretty inexpensive. Worth a look.

The best bins for Cree XR-E and XP-E LEDs are available NOW and are rated at over 110 lumens per watt.
The XP-g is due within the next six months and will get over 130 lumens per watt.

Is this the rear light that is mentioned in this thread?

http://www.officerstore.com/store/pr...d_light_baton/

No....the correct URL is: http://www.flashbakonline.com/ . I've been watching cyclist as I travel around for work, and I have seen a growing number of these FlashBak lights on riders. I'm also beginning to think amber is a better color for cyclists rear lights to use over red. Amber seems to be easier to see than red at long distances.

Pretty nifty, but one might want to verify the legality of rear facing amber lighting in their area.

Also, I noticed it says 250 peak lumens....that would have to be a cumulative total of all the lights together. Looks as though there are 10 total.....that's 25 lumen per light. It would be interesting to see how that compares to one of the half-watt or 1 watt rear blinkies. Reason I mention is because it says visible up to 500 yards. That's 1500 feet. That's less than a third of a mile. The Superflash for example says it is visible up to 1 mile. That's quite a difference. I'm not saying having 10 lights like that in sequence is not going to be very eye catching (an entire row of lights usually is), I'm just trying to make a relative comparison. For $50 (the cost on the website for the flashbak), I could put two Superflashes on my pack and be visible from a further distance (and be proportionately brighter as the distances decrease), use AAA batteries (lighter, cheaper), and have the versatility to use one as a permanent mount on my bike in addition to one that clips on. This thing looks somewhat cumbersome and uses 3 AA's. Plus it says nothing about run time, but I'm guessing with that much total output it's going to drain three AA's much quicker than two AAA's (Superflash can get you 100 hours in flashing mode....and just to be clear I am aware that I am comparing one with one now). And, regardless of the impressive cumulative lumen output, it evidently doesn't show up any further down the road than an individual 25 lumen light. What do you think?

I also was not impressed with their comparison rhetoric in the "product advantages" section. It states:

"A standard bike light can be seen for approximately
50 feet, but the FlashBak can be seen from a distance
of 2000 feet or more."

What kind of standard is 50 feet for "be seen"? That really serves to undermine their credibility with such a ridiculous statement. Not to mention they went from posting that their product is visible "up to" 500 yards (1500 feet) to 2000 feet "or more" (how much more???) in separate pages on the same site. Which is it?

One more thing.....a 30 day warranty? Are you kidding? Superflash has a lifetime warranty.

Really, I am not trying to gratuitously bash this product. It could be a very good one for a particular niche. But I felt like some of these things should be pointed out. Nor am I trying to build up the Superflash (any more than it typically is). I don't even own one......I'm just using it as an example. I also understand the two products are not exactly apples to apples since they are different in their construction.....but they do serve to provide the same end result, illumination for rear safety.

I agree. A 140-lumen DiNotte taillight should be "visible" from over 4 miles in darkness*, and can definitely command attention from more than 1 mile (according to a co-worker who overtook me on a long straight section of highway at night). If their light array is really producing 240 lumens, it should be visible from a heck of a lot farther than 500 yards. I have little bar-tip blinkies that are visible from well beyond 500 yards, to say nothing of mainstream ones like a SuperFlash, premium ones like a DiNotte, or homebrew alternatives like a Nova.


:roflmao:

good catch ccd ;)


*if anyone's wondering why I pick "4 miles," it's because I can see car taillights at that range on a very long straight section of Highway 195 in the dark countryside, and the DiNotte has at least as much power as a car's full brake light

Yeah, saying that an average blinkie is visible for 50 feet is kind of silly. I guess if you buy the cheapest light you can find at the dollar store then your average may be 50 feet. But many laws require 500 foot visibility, and I know that people at work have said they saw me from over a half mile away, and that was when I was running SuperFlashes. Now that I have a Dinotte 140L, I've had people say that they were able to see my light even when we were both heading into the sun and they couldn't see much of anything.

lights always seem brighter when they are not on the bike. maybe because when you are moving you need to see further down the road than when you are standing in your office or backyard. when I first used my magicshine I thought dim would be adequate but as soon as I got one the road I left it on high and that's how I use it. from what I've read, 2 lights are ideal 1 on bar 1 on helmet and of course a rear strobe

Certainly the claims on the FlashBak are outlandish. I guarantee my PBSF, which pales in comparison to my DiNotte, can be seen for significantly more than 50 feet. That being what it is, the FlashBak seems like a good idea.

I did some digging around on the net, and found in Oct 09 it was $32 if it was ordered from their website. Now, 6 months later, it is $45 from their website. I wonder why the steep price increase?

I would take a chance on it and buy it for $32. There's no way I'd pay $45 for it without being able to see it/handle it myself. The reason is because the DiNotte is so bright, my PBSF is rendered virtually useless. I'd like to know if that would be the case for the FlashBak as well.

There is NO way that this can outperform a PB superflash or Mars 3.0.

It claims 250 lumens, but that is almost definitely due to cumulative addition of all the low-powered lights. Each of those lights is going to be a fraction of 250 lumens. I'd be surprised if it even reached 50 lumens per light. The only way this could possibly compare to the superflash is if the batts on the superflash were really run-down and near-dead.

I do like the more "human" shape of the lighting - that's a plus. But I'll take a Mars 3.0 any day over this thing. A single spot uber-bright source that's visible from further away (like a superflash) is more useful to me than a wide spread of low-powered lights that you might not notice until you're right behind.