I've heard mixed reviews about the Knog Frog, a shop near my house sells them for about 5 bucks... for that deal I'd definitely buy one (depending on how bright they are).
I've heard some people say that they suck and I've heard some people say that they are perfectly fine, what's your opinion? Buy or not?

I have a front and a rear I like them because you can almost put them anywhere you want. They are not that bright enough to lets say light a path way up in full darkness. I use them to mainly just be seen by drivers. the street lamps guide my way around the city at night so I really don't need a light to light my way.

Most knogs are for being seen, not seeing

they're barely bright enough to light up a manifest when mounted on your helmet visor.

if you want to be visible to attentive drivers, they're fine. if you want to supplement your constant lighting with a blinkie, they're fine. if you want to fight a traffic citation for biking without lights, they're fine(a cop can't say "these aren't proper lighting" like they can with car lamps that suck)...

if you want to see anything with your lights or if you want to catch the attention of inattentive drivers, they leave a lot to be desired.

5 bucks is about the best deal on functioning blinking bike lights you'll find and the knog frog is definitely worth that. especially the strobe, which has an optic lens around the led... but if you want real lighting get the knog boomer or skink, which are expensive but worth it.

and if you want to light up a road bright enough to see at 30mph you need a real light like a P7 emitter or an HID. magicshine, dealextreme, or any real bike light like the MiNewt nightrider and up will be a much better idea than the non-rechargable lights from any manufacturer.

for grabbing attention, i don't think there's a better light out than the knog boomer. dinottes are too expensive, and anything similarly priced has a crappy mounting solution that is a hassle until i breaks.

You might as well buy a planet bike super flash and headlight twin pack.
Do you know how much CR2032 batteries cost?

A lot more than AAA batteries. And if you wanted to, you can even use NiMH rechargable batteries in the planet bike lights.

same as with the boomer.

$5 a great deal for a frog... I would jump on that; the shops near me sell them for $15....

as a primary light they're terrible. but I have one on my bike jsut to supplement my proper rear light. I got mine for free, and just leave it on the bike at all times. Ive been caught out later than expected a couple of times, and didn't have my primary light, so at least with the frog other bikers could see me, and it was better than nothing. Also, technically, im biking legally in the dark.

yeah my frogs stay on my helmet so worse comes to worst i'm not doing an impression of a ninja.

How do you manage that?

silicon stretches. one's around the visor and the other's around a portion right above the rear adjustment. it works.

well, actually my friend has my rear one right now.

That makes sense; I don't have a visor or rear adjustment on my lazer helium.... so I was thinking of one being mounted sideways which isn't very feasible

it actually works pretty well. better than the freddy dorktastic swing mounts i've seen a lot of people with:

they suck. They really do, even for being seen by cars. Maybe if you have several mounted on the bike they'll be OK

I use my knog as a supplement to my regular light. Its not very bright at all, i wouldn't use it by itself.

depending on what u're looking for. On a scale of 1 to 10..
ability of being seen.. 4
ability of lighting up ur way.. 0

So are most bike lights.

I notice that the knog lights clamp on have any of you had problems with them becoming unsecured and moving or are they pretty secure?

i bought some beetles from off of lafixed, so i could ride at night. i later found out that they arent ideal for night riding. so i bought the superflash pack the next day. i still bring the beatles on rides i take with friends incase one of them doesnt have any lights. it does make it easier for them to be seen at night and noticed at night when he was lagging behind us.

that's with 20/20 vision.

There are motorists with less than that and some of them refuse to wear corrective lenses, so it's more like

ability of being seen.. 0
ability of lighting up ur way.. 0

=

chance of survival.. 0

I've had significantly less dumb-****in-driver-pulling-right-out-at-me interactions since I ditched the Knog for a flea. Those little suckers are bright!

they're better than nothing, but once their battery is worn down after about an hour of use anything is better than a frog.

Can we elevate the discourse here just a little bit?

Lighting: Three main points

Beam -
The light that emits from a lamp can either be scattered in an uncontrolled way, as from a candle or open flame, or focused into a beam as from a movie projector or car headlight or maglight flashlight.

With LED lamps, the anode cathode connection in the diode is suspended in a plastic or glass (plastic) dome nearly always, and this dome shapes the diode's emission into a beam of sorts.

Your proverbial LED has a dome that focuses most of the light in a relatively narrow angle, and this is what the knog frog's LED does. it is visible from nearly 180 degrees, but the majority of the light is focused in roughly a 15 degree circle. The exact specification of the diode can change the area and layout of the beam. This dome is called the Optic, and certain LEDs have different optics on and surrounding them.

Angle of View - For a lamp for which the purpose is being seen, you don't want a narrow angle of view with all the light concentrated in the center unless the primary viewing angle can fall within that angle of view.
A lamp is going to produce a certain amount of light, and the optic applied to that light source can only put that light in different places. The more it bends the light the more light it absorbs, though if it's high quality that will be a fraction of a percentage. For roadway use, most of the viewers are going to be in a set direction from the vehicle, so it makes sense to make optics that focus the light into a narrow area when making a tail light or front light. However, bikes are often at most danger when traveling perpendicular or at an angle to traffic. When someone's merging, or coming out of a driveway, or otherwise.
For those occasions, you want a lamp that is fairly non-directional... you want light to be emitted from all sides of the source so that someone is able to see you from any angle.
For seeing the road, you want something in between these two extremes. You want a beam that has concentrated light in the center and a wide, even spread for as wide as you can get it... but a beam to see the road has to put out a light that's intense enough to illuminate the scene and make it back to your eyes... so it has to be far more intense than a marking or signaling light. So intense in fact, that drivers and people viewing it, will have no choice but to focus on that light above others in the field of vision, and because of the beam pattern and spread of that light you can't make it directional enough to avoid dazzling people when it's not pointed at them least you decrease the angle of view to the point where its a spotlight, which hurts your ability to see anything in the periphery of your vision, rendering the main beam exceptionally dangerous to the user. This is why it's very important for car optics to have a 'dipped beam' or cutoff. it keeps the majority of intense light out of the eyes of oncoming road users while keeping the light on the road intense enough to see well by.

Lighting Intensity and Driver attention - People's eyes all work differently, but for the most part one's eyes are drawn to what's brightest in a scene. Intensity commands attention. When there's a large discrepancy between light and dark, something that would ordinarily be plenty bright becomes hard to notice.
Certain colors can command attention better than others too, but these are mostly used by emergency crews or signals. Blue, in particular, is almost universally reserved for police because it's a very attention-grabbing color.
For bike lighting, this means that an intense light with high output is going to get you noticed more than anything else as long as its aimed at the person who needs to see you.
However, this is far more effective in dark environments where people who use roadways have bright lights. In bright urban environments with so much light pollution and roadway lighting that vehicle illumination need only be markers and signals, intense lights actually hurt a driver's ability to see things. Many European cities have made main car beam use illegal within certain city limits because the bright lights dazzle people, doing more harm than good for illumination.

The last point about attention is that strobing or flashing patterns are immediate attention grabbers. Something the flashes or strobes grabs the attention of a PASSIVE viewer with much more immediacy than a solid light, unless the viewer is actively trying to acquire new subjects to identify or trying to determine the vector of an already acquired subject.

From this you should take away that the situation can vary widely in terms of what the 'best' type of lighting is.

Conclusion and Ramblings:

Whether a Knog Frog is a good light or not depends entirely on where and how it's being used.

If it's being used in a farmland country road, it has a low chance of commanding the attention of someone in a truck with five driving lights lighting up the road. Hopefully the truck driver will be looking for you with all that illumination, but your Knog Frog may as well be off in such a case.
Replace that truck with a horse and buggy burning oil lamps, and your knog frog will be the brightest thing in the road as long as it's aimed at the driver.

However, if you have your knog frog in the parking lot of a supermarket that's lit well by overhead lamps in the middle of a city, and no motorist has illegally bright or overly intense headlamps shining on you, the knog frog will do its job just fine, especially blinking... until the intensity of the surroundings matches the intensity of the knog frog's beam in that centermost wash of its viewing angle... at which point you'll be visible with or without a frog.

A frog aimed at the ground is going to be less intense than a frog aimed right at the faces of the people you're trying to catch the attention of.

For most riding, it's better to have something a little more intense than a Knog Frog. If you want illumination, you're going to have to have a crap load of power... more than any small normal battery. You need a 3v LED pushing more than 300 lumens or a 10w HID lamp with rechargeable power packs to really illuminate a road safely at 25 mph, and that's more serious than anything that straps to your bars and costs 15 bucks. Don't condemn the Frog because you want it to do something nothing else can do at that price point and weight.

However, if all you do is ride to the skatepark at dusk on slow moving surface streets in a quiet neighborhood where no one uses their headlights, your knog frog will be the brightest thing on the street and it will be fine.

if you travel opposite socal bros in lifted trucks with blue lights down a boulevard with intense street signs glaring in people's eyes, you should probably get a knog boomer, or five superflashes, and then wear a devo hat that sings yankee doodle dandy at 140 decibels, because otherwise people just aren't going to notice you.

the knog frog is great supplemental marking light but to use it as a main taillight you have to be in an environment where you're so well lit people would have to be asleep not to see you.

and for downtown city riding, it's FINE. it blinks. that's all you need to be seen in a city. of course, the batteries will die and then it won't be intense enough, so replace your batteries often no matter what light you get.

for beam, the frog is just about as good as any <1w LED. it's just less intense and only uses one led.
for angle of view, the frog leaves a lot to be desired because it has neither an optic to focus the light beyond the diode itself, and only having one led means they don't point different directions.
for visibility, it's infinitely better than nothing and has virtually not advantages over any other lamp that blinks.

but it costs half to a tenth what a flea costs. the flea is the best in terms of size vs. intensity, but they have a VERY small angle of view so i don't really like them that much. they're not intense outside of that small angle of view, and for a marker light you want it wiiiide.

if you absolutely HAVE to be seen, get a boomer. i would feel comfortable with my boomer ANYWHERE. I could be on an airplane runway and that thing would make me noticed.

Be careful- this isn't true everywhere. In the municpality I lived in until May, a light had to be clearly visible from a distance of a certain distance (500 feet?), and if memory serves, someone posted on here this spring about getting a DUI in Seattle (or maybe Portland) after getting stopped for insufficient lighting. That said, there are very few places where law enforcement would have an issue with insufficient lighting. My old town's police department has essentially declared war on cyclists "for our own good" (they threatened to impound one of my bikes because it was locked to a streetlight for five minutes and wasn't registered in their ridiculous database, which they pretended addressed our substantial theft issue. The officer actually waited next to it for me to come out of the store). Insufficient lighting is one of their major targets (and probably the only one that makes any sense).

They'd have a very hard time backing that up in court against a good lawyer, as you can certainly see a Knog Frog from a distance of 500 feet in clear conditions.

The cop's definition of "sufficient" is likely to pull some weight with a judge, but without a governing sanctioning body like the SAE it's no where near as measurable as automotive lighting.

Of course, it's my opinion that you have to be doing something else illegal or suspicious for them to pull that on you anyway(like biking drunk).

As much as I wish cops would start pulling people over for blue headlights, they only use that as a tool to bring someone in for other reasons, and same goes for bikes.