As an off- shoot to winter blues I thought I’d post a link to possibly the best light manufacturer around - when I win the lottery I’m going to buy all of these, just for fun
Light & Motion is also makes very good lighting systems.
I’ve been thinking about getting the ARC Cabeza. It’s a HID system that is super bright. Probably too bright 
I’ve seen it in the dark but haven’t seen what it would be like on the trails. Would it be so bright that it completely washes out the trail? Or would the brightness be goodness?
Presumably enough light to see is good, but so much light that it destroys your night vision completely so you can’t see outside your little circle is A Bad Thing…
Phil, just me
Re: Winter Blues no longer
In my experience, any light at all completely blows out your night vision
and that’s not a bad thing. The light is mounted on your helmet so wherever
you look, you see. There is such as thing as too much light. In fog or thick
dust you definitely want lower power. At 24 Hours of Adrenalin I had to use
lower power or else all I saw was a huge all encompassing dust cloud.
From 1983 to 1992, our ethic was that for night time rides, you go without
any light at all for a more pure experience. From 1992 to 1998 I used a
NiteSun dual beam system that had 3 power settings and worked pretty well.
During this time, Bruce Bundy introduced me to the (awesome) idea of riding
full speed at night with a bright light. Since 1998 I’m using a NiteRider
dual beam system with 5 power settings and I use all the settings. 6W for
unicycle most of the time, bike uphill. 9W for fast unicycle or modest
biking. 12W for fastest unicycling, reasonable biking, and normal bike
commuting. 20W for fast downhill biking, 32W for fastest insane bike
descents.
For me, going to a setup with only 2 power settings would be pretty
limiting. I use my NiteRider 5 nights a week from Oct to April for 30
minutes commuting, plus the occasional longer outing, usually on unicycle.
When I’m biking, the light is mounted to my handlebar, but the serious
mountain bikers use two systems, one on handlebars and one on helmet. Lots
of bikers are switching over to the HID lights, but I have no need for more
illumination or burn time.
All that being said, remember to TURN OFF the light when you’re out under
the brilliant full moon. That’s what it’s all about.
—Nathan, about to power up the NiteRider and pedal home…
“phil” <phil.f5w3a@timelimit.unicyclist.com> wrote in message
news:phil.f5w3a@timelimit.unicyclist.com…
>
> john_childs wrote:
> > Would it be so bright that it completely washes out the trail? Or
> > would the brightness be goodness?
>
>
> Presumably enough light to see is good, but so much light that it
> destroys your night vision completely so you can’t see outside your
> little circle is A Bad Thing…
Re: Re: Winter Blues no longer
I’m going to have to try to borrow a HID light to see how it will work on trail conditions. It would be crazy to spend that much on a light without a test drive.
I currently have a NiteRider Digital Head Trip (15W halogen). It does OK, but the light isn’t as even as I would like and the unevenness in the light makes it difficult at times to see bumps in the trail.
The HID lights have a more consistent light pattern (it doesn’t seem to have that funky wavy shadow from the halogen bulb). But they are soooo bright and you can’t dim them.
I do agree that too much light can cause visibility problems. Fog, dust, breath fog, and rain call all cause problems with a helmet mounted light. The light just reflects right back and means you can’t see through it.
nite sun can kiss my ass,they were the best light around back in the early 90’s but there stuff was total crap in the rain,even though there local advertising said otherwise…there warrenty department was up there with the USPS dead letter office…
Niterider (a then scuba diving company) saw this and cornered the market for several years with much better sevice and equipment…
i will never buy a Night-sun product again.
P.S.nite-sun’s idea of a “quik release mount” is a screwdriver and a wingnut… 
the ultimate bike lights are by a german company that I can’t remember the name of, they do HID lights with li-ion batteries that last for absolutely insane amounts of time.
Other than that, the ones to buy have to be lumicycle, they don’t have all the fancy remote switches and dimming units and stuff, which means that they just work and don’t have any problems. They also have a head mount that comes off if you hit it really hard, which means you don’t break the mount. My standard setup has been crashed hard enough to knock them off the head mount several times without suffering anything worse than scratches and a slightly bent head mount when I crashed directly onto it, which I just bent back. They have an HID setup now which looks like something out of Dan Dare, silver and shiny and curvy rocket shaped.
HID is okay as long as you’re riding with full lights all the time, you’re supposed to keep it on for all the ride, using it just as a full beam for hard bits means much shorter lamp life which with very expensive lamps is a big bad thing.
Joe
Re: Winter Blues no longer
> Other than that, the ones to buy have to be lumicycle, they don’t have
> all the fancy remote switches and dimming units and stuff, which means
> that they just work and don’t have any problems.
Rain-proof, too. I managed to smash one of the lamps, but
(thankfully) it was in the back of the car at the time and not on
my head. Other than that, I’ve had no problems at all.
I really like the helmet-mounting kit (basically a wide neoprene belt).
Simple and effective.
For most of the night riding I’ve done in practice, I probably need
light to be seen more than to see, so the Lumis are perhaps a bit
OTT.
What’s HID?
Arnold the Aardvark
Re: Re: Winter Blues no longer
HID = high intensity discharge
These bulbs are basically “controlled arc discharge” lights. They require a high voltage for starting (7,000-25,000 V) and a lower voltage (e.g. 90 V) to run. One of their peculiarities is that they cannot be restarted before they cool down. These requirements place some demands on the control circuitry… On the positive side: HID lights are about 3 times more effective than halogen lights and have a much higher life expectancy (since there is no tungsten filament involved).
For more details check out:
http://www.universalballast.com/techSupport/trouble_shooting/HID_tech_guide.html
Have fun,
Fred