So, even before I heard about special online deals on Pyrolights and MagicShines, I was intrigued to learn that “warmer” bike-lights may be better than the regular cool white MagicShine that I already owned. So I borrowed a couple of Pyrolights from Hannes Zietsman to try them out. Background Here’s the thing – I feel safer riding on the road at night. The darker the better. During the day I’m just a few brightly-coloured pixels in a crowded landscape but, in the dark, for the occasional motorist sharing the road with me, I’m a beacon of brilliant light – impossible to miss. I hope. And of course riding off-road at night is just… dope! But, either way, you need a good light, dude. And maybe you’ve noticed – there’s been a revolution in the bike-light business. A couple of years ago if you wanted to ride in the dark you had to REALLY punish the plastic. As recently as July 2009, MTB Review declared the German-designed Lupine Tesla 4 their favourite headlight: “The performance, packaging, reliability and ease of operation is perfect. And get this, it’s affordable!” The Tesla 4 listed for $488. However, just a few months later, everything changed. A Chinese company called Shenzhen Minjun Electronic Co Ltd produced a knock-off of the same light, called the MagicShine MJ-808, which did pretty much the same job – but listed for $85. Since then a whole bunch of MagicShines have appeared, to some very solid reviews, and the world now looks very different from the saddle of a bike, at night. Here in SA there are lots of places to buy MagicShines. Many of the bike shops keep them, and there are a bunch of home businesses importing and selling them online. Actually, the supply side is a bit chaotic, but it’s a great time to be a customer – even if you don’t buy a MagicShine light, because they have forced the established manufacturers to sharpen their pencils, so you are much more likely to be able to afford a light from one of the other big names. Meanwhile, behind the brand-names, there’s another revolution going on. Advances in LED (light emitting diode) technology have been so rapid that they’ve all but killed older technologies like halogen and HID (high intensity discharge), also known as Xenon. Driven to a significant extent by an American company called Cree Inc., today’s LEDs are durable, efficient, relatively cheap and, above all, bright. But they are also cold. That is, the light they produce tends to be stronger at the blue-end of the colour spectrum, while incandescents like halogen favour the yellow/red “warm” end. There’s a school of thought that our vision dims as a reflex when faced with blueish light, because this light is associated with harsh mid-day conditions. Conversely, our vision is said to become more acute when the light is warmer. Convinced that all of this has a real impact on our ability to distinguish between soft sand and hard-pack, and between broken glass and tarmac, Stellenbosch engineer Hannes Zietsman commissioned MagicShine to produce a “warmer” light using different, full-spectrum LEDs, which he markets as Pyrolights. His lights are drawn from the regular MagicShine range, which includes various units to serve different needs, and they cost no more than the regular lights. But should you care? That’s what I set out to discover, and in the process I learned a lot more about lumens, beams and batteries. The test units I sampled three MagicShine units – two from Hannes’ Pyrolights range and a third from another distributor. The three units are as follows: The MJ-808E is a twice-upgraded version of the original MJ-808 that upset the apple cart a couple of years ago. With the “E” version, MagicShine upgraded the emitter to the latest 1,000-lumen Cree XM-L, and Hannes went one further by specifying a 4,000k (warm light) emitter. His Pyrolight 1,000 comes with a four-cell 4.4 amp-hour water-resistant battery pack. The MJ-872 is a four-LED MagicShine design using the somewhat older Cree XP-G emitters, each rated at 400 lumens. Word is that the colour temperature of these emitters varies randomly between 5,000-8,000k – the manual white-balance function on my digital camera suggests mine is around 5,500k. It is usually supplied, and was assessed for weight and endurance, with the same 4.4 a/h battery pack as the MJ-808E. The MJ-880 is MagicShine’s top-of-the-range light head, using two of the latest Cree XM-L emitters in a compact housing. This particular unit is, again, built by the factory to Pyrolight’s specifications, and supplied with a six-cell water-resistant 6.6 a/h battery pack and a high-output charger which is not compatible with the four-cell packs (the shape of the connector is different). All of these lights have clicky switches that glow in various colours to show the state of the battery charge, although the implementation varies a bit between units. All attach to your handlebars using rubber O-rings or straps, or can be attached to a helmet via an inexpensive adaptor and extension power lead. Battery packs can strap on to the bike frame, fit in a bottle-cage, or tuck in the pocket of your shirt. MagicShine’s standard guarantee is a year on the lights and six months on their battery packs. Findings Here’s what I learned. When it comes to brightness, the magic number is 1,000 lumens. Although it’s impossible to test lumens yourself, and rumour has it that many manufacturers tell porkie pies about the brightness of their products, most units that claim 1,000 lumen or more are plenty bright. The following pictures show the three test units at full power. All were taken at the same manual settings, with white-balance set for “daylight”. The traffic-cones are 10 metres apart. Although it looks like the lights were pointed downwards, they weren’t – the beams were levelled to give the most even lighting in the foreground, and the best illumination in the distance. [Thanks to Schapenberg MTB park in Sir Lowry’s Village for giving us access at night!] This is the Pyrolight 1,000: Here's the MagicShine MJ-872: And finally the Pyrolight/MagicShine MJ-880 But it’s not just brightness that counts – there’s also the “shape” of the light. Some lights focus their output into a tight beam or spot, while others are more floodlight, distributing their light more evenly. Most aim for a combination of the two but, from my own observations, there’s no perfect formula – it depends what you’re using it for. The following pictures give some idea of the shape of the beams of these three lights (NOT their brightness in relation to each other). The single emitter Pyrolight 1,000/MJ-808E has a very powerful but comparatively narrow spot, with a relatively weak halo around the central beam: The light from the MJ-872, on the other hand, appears to increase evenly from the edge to the centre. The photo is a bit misleading – in practice, there’s no distinct central spot, although the centre is very much brighter than the edge: The “owl eyes” MJ-880 combines the features of the other two lights – a powerful central spot, which is wider than the MJ-808E, and a halo that is brighter and wider than that light, but not quite as wide as the MJ-872: So how does this translate on the bike? As a rule of thumb, I found more “spot” was better on the road, more “flood” was better on the dirt – but too much of either was never a good thing. And it made a huge difference if the light was mounted on handlebar or helmet. To illustrate: if you mount a light with a narrow spot on the handlebars of a mountain bike, the beam waves about wildly as you negotiate anything remotely technical, without really showing where you want to go. However the same beam on your helmet is okay, since you can point it wherever you’re looking, but you do get this feeling of riding down a dark tunnel. Off-road, a combination of a flood light on your handlebars and a spotlight on your helmet is ideal but, of course, it means more cost and weight – especially as you’ll need two sets of batteries (attaching your helmet to the bike with a cable is not a good idea if you go in separate directions!) For most of us, the answer is a light that combines spot and flood in one beam. Riding on the road is the same – but different! A floodlight on your handlebars or helmet is great to see potholes and broken glass, a nanosecond before you ride into them! At speed, you need a good beam to see stuff in time to avoid it, but with enough “halo” or secondary light to see the road immediately in front of you at the same time. However, if that halo is too bright, the foreground will be so bright that your eyes will not adjust to the relative dimness in the distance. Once again, a spot light on your helmet solves this problem, and is great for alerting motorists and pedestrians that you’re approaching. How long? In terms of endurance, obviously longer is better. But bigger battery packs cost more and weigh more so, once again, you should think about what you want to do with your light/s. The following table shows the (tested) endurance and weight, along with other data: All of these lights have variable power settings, and burn for MUCH longer when the power is reduced. On the road, I throttle back the lumens when riding up hills, or under street lights, and I finish a three-hour ride with half the battery charge remaining, while on dirt I find I need all the light I can get, all of the time. If you’re planning an overnight MTB event, you’ll need to stock up on battery packs and recharge those you’re not using. Unfortunately, with the brighter lights, battery packs take longer to charge (three and a half hours) than to discharge (around two hours) so… I’ll leave you to figure out how many battery packs you’ll need. Bear in mind you’ll need to carry a charged spare in your pocket because when these suckers die, they die! Another consideration is redundancy – having lights on both handlebars and helmet, each with their own batteries, means that if one light dies, you’re not left (entirely) in the dark. Also, having a light on your helmet makes it a LOT easier to fix a puncture. Even if you don’t have a “real” lamp on your helmet, you should think about duct-taping an inexpensive hiking light onto your helmet for this reason. While the colour-coded clicky switches give you some idea of how much battery charge is left, I found they are not very… logical, even though all three lights lasted as long as they are supposed to. For example the MJ808E gave the longest burn time, at more than three hours, but skipped the flashing red indicator to tell me it was about to die while, bizarrely, the big daddy MJ-880 spent an hour – half of its burn time – flashing redly to warn me that less than 10% of the battery power remained! Conclusion I get annoyed with reviews that simply tell you that you get what you pay for but, guess what? And it gets worse. I’d say the improvement between the cheapest and the most expensive light here is pretty much in line with the extra you pay – which is a rarity in the consumer world, where small improvements often mean exponential increases in price. Overall, I think the best off-road light in this group is the mid-range MJ-872, and the best road light is the “owl eyes” MJ-880. The longest-lasting light, by far, and also the light with the farthest-reaching beam, is the cheapest – the MJ-808E. Together with its light weight, this makes it the best light for helmet mounting, IMHO. And what about the colour of these lights – is “warm” light better? I think it is. When you first turn on the Pyrolights, they don’t seem as bright (maybe the word “dazzling” is more appropriate) as the “cold” light of the regular unit. But on the bike you can see just as well, and maybe better, with the warmer lights. The colours around you – leaves, grass, sand, mud, road markings, people’s clothing – are definitely more vivid. A headlight isn’t just about staying on the road or trail, and avoiding rocks and potholes – it’s about recognizing shapes, textures and colours soon enough to pick the best line through them. And I’m satisfied that warmer light helps me to do that. So, yeah, all things being equal, I would go for a Pyrolight.
