Easy, most are standard RC battery packs from reliable companies. Just do a quick search yourself and you'll see what I mean. Nothing fancy about a battery pack and it's just too easy to source reliable one for it to be a problem now days.

I don't know anything about RC battery packs so I wouldn't know a good one from a bad one. It all looks like Chinese OEM packs of varying manufacturing origin (and therefore varying quality) to me.

I'll stick with my Cygolites and their matched smart charging units. Might be a bit more money, but at least I know the engineers intended them to work together and might even have given their supplier a quality spec.

Magicshine works great for me. I ride in a large city but there are a few areas of my commute where I need a bright light that can illuminate a good amount of the road ahead since I like to ride briskly. The price is great and this is the second winter I'm using it and so far so good.

LOL, Cool but I wonder just how much "Made In China" is floating around your house. Sort of hard to avoid their products and they certainly are working on their QA issues because they want to compete worldwide. As to the RC batteries, a little research should alleviate any QA concerns with them. Wonder how many Chinese components are in the Cygolite products??

2nd the dinotte for the beam quality and the quality of construction. Also, consider Serfas new lights. Looks like they put a ton of thought into their new line. The 250 one would be an excellent helmet mount w/ no cords and you would still have enough cash for a bar mount.

You misunderstand me. I'm not avoiding "Made in China". My bikes are made in Taiwan and I have tons of high quality goods manufactured in China. As a supply chain and engineering person, though, I know that the range of quality coming out of China is huge and there is a lot of junk buried in the generic goods. Caveat emptor.

Cool, but when you lump all batteries together like you did with your reply about the RC batteries you came off as biased against the chinese. Since your a "supply chain and engineering person" how would you go about solving this battery problem? Is going with a product like the Dinotte worth the significant cost over just finding a reliable battery for an otherwise worthy product like the magicshine? I ask that because that was my decision process. I ruled out the Dinotte due to cost and was then looking at Cygolite products. But the Magicshine gave me a more effective product at a cheaper cost even when I figured in having to possibly replace the battery.

As an example, Magicshine for $89 + $40 Replacement battery gives me at least 500 actual lumens for $ 129. Cygolite Mitycross 400 gives me a claimed 400 lumen at $ 171 which is still a good bit more than the Magicshine with a maybe unneeded replacement battery. More cost/less performance = bad buy in my book.

Now for others factors like run time may be of a larger concern and they may decide differently. Worse case for me is needing 1 hour of battery power to finish out my daily evening ride.

Anyway, our different points of view just illustrate the challenges any manufacturer faces meeting the needs of their prospective market.

Don't know why you thought I was biased against the Chinese. It's a fact that most of the goods on sites like DealExtreme are made in China, and it's a fact that the quality can vary significantly between manufacturers (same as in the US and anywhere else in the world).

My decision process for lights prioritized battery life in the cold (2 to 3 hours), cleanly mountable and interchangeable between my bikes. Therefore I looked for lights specifically design for a cycling application, with a clean design for lights and batteries, and long quoted run times. I know that the charger can significantly affect the battery life so I wanted a complete system. I looked at NiteRider (poor battery life), Dinotte (didn't care for the mounting system), and Cygolite (my only beef here is fairly short cables between battery and lighthead). It's been as advertised for run time, the batteries have maintained their runtime through numerous charging cycles, they don't lose enough runtime in the cold that they run out on me, and they are easy to switch between bikes.

That's how I went about it.

I've tried most of the stuff everyone has mentioned.

Trust me - the MagicShine at about $100 will beat the pants off everything mentioned in brightness, price, bang for buck, runtime.

The closest thing at REI or your LBS will cost over $400. It really is that good.

200 lumens is dicey enough for me to not feel comfortable at all on roads riding a road bike. I can do it, but I'd only do it as a to-see light in emergency situations, since over 15mph, you can't see much at all.

Riding with MS at night is awesome. The tail-light is also awesome, and can run off the same battery pack without much drain on the headlight. (It is as bright as a $120 Dinotte tail-light.)

You really are wasting your money with anything else, it's that good. (It's amazing how advertising bike-specific stuff in magazines and stores can still cause folks to buy puny 100 lumen lights for $100+ when the MS is around.)

I've got a dinotte 140-AA whatever tail light and am looking for a different headlight. The light is excellent and will send the riders behind you into an epileptic seizure if it's aimed wrong.

-But- The mounting system for it is lousy. It uses o-rings which stretch out over time and allow the light to move around on the seatpost.

That's the main reason I'm looking at other headlights.

There were a couple of mentions of non-MagicShine replacement batteries. I was thinking of getting a 2nd battery.
What is compatible and has the right connector for the light & charger ?

I used a Dinotte 200L with the 2-cell, and later the 4-cell, battery for two years or so. Yes, it is an amazing light, and well constructed, but that said, after a year or so the wire started pulling out of the battery. No crashes, no violent events, just living in my bag or on my bike. Dinotte was decent, but not great, about replacing the battery even though it was under warranty: they gave me half the replacement cost.

Getting the new battery did fix the intermittent connection problem that I had.

I recently got all my good lights stolen and decided to not replace with Dinotte. The reason is simply that I wanted something brighter than the 200L, but not their 800 model, and their 400 model requires a screwdriver to attach and remove from the handlebars. Yuck. So I went with a Cygolite Mitycross 320 which has been a great light thus far.

The best setup I've found thus far is this: your biggest, brightest light on the handlebars along with a blinkie, and a bright, not insane but bigger than a blinkie, light on the helmet. Before that consisted of the Dinotte 200L on the bars and a Sigma Karma Pro on the helmet, both around 200 lumens. After having all that stolen I'm now using the Cygolite Mitycross 320 on the bars and a Niterider MiNewt Cordless 150 on the helmet. Having a bright light you can throw around with your head makes a HUGE difference both for seeing around corners and for cars seeing you. I was amazed at the difference when I first got my helmet light. That said, you want your better light on the bars for the reasons stated above: shadow relief and whatnot.

When considering a helmet light do think about how easy it is to remove. The Sigma Karma Pro was pretty much permanently attached (zipties) which meant that even when riding during the day I had half a pound of light strapped to my head. Even if you can't remove the mount itself, just being able to take off the light is good for both comfort and security (I really hate hauling my helmet around with me).

At this point I think that the "Dinotte or 'nuffin" approach is anachronistic. Two, even three years ago, yes, Dinotte was head and shoulders above the rest. My first light was the Niterider Sol which died after riding in the rain for two or three days. My second was the Cygolite Dualcross (200, I think), which was a great light but frickin' huge. Now, however, Niterider and Cygolite both offer products beyond anything Dinotte has (self-contained 100 - 250 lumen lights with decent battery life), and most of the well known brands have figured out how to make good connectors that are water tight and reliable. I'd never heard of or considered a Sigma light, but the Karma Pro went through an entire Seattle winter, on my helmet, with nary a hiccup. I didn't really consider Cygolite as a replacement for the 200L until I realized just how small their lights and batteries had gotten: the Mitycross is about the size of the 200L, has a better beam pattern, is brighter, and only sacrifices half an hour of battery life (compared to the 2-cell battery). I think Dinotte has been sitting on their haunches while the other guys are catching up, or in some cases, passing them.