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Barry Beams Bike Light Meets Funding Via Kickstarter, Replicates Car Headlight

Written by Colin McCaleb
13 Comments
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barry beams bike light high powered led

Kickstarter’s been treating bike light developers kindly, with both Revolights and Blink Steady collecting well over double the cash necessary for startup. Barry Beams is yet another bike light project, but with a different premise — to be bright enough in the right places to replicate a car headlight. The LED beam pattern disperses light evenly from the focal point to the peripherals.

Designed to handle the demands of road racers undergoing high speed descents at night, it illuminates all immediate surroundings and objects up to one mile away. We don’t have the official product pics yet, as they’re still in the late prototype stage. We do have a few things though, like weights, settings, and luminosity. Click through the break for more…

barry beams led bike light high powered

Quoted power is 1400 + lumens, powerful enough to significantly brighten a road if dispersed correctly. Total weight is 214g and it features 5 brightness settings and six flash modes. The brightest setting gets you about an hour at 1400 lumens while the lowest setting gets you 52 hours. At the luminosity of a car headlight, it’ll run 2.5 hours. No times are quoted for flash modes.

Lithium ion batteries power the light and the shell pops open for swapping backup batteries on the go. Pricing will be $218 retail and they’ll be available at SomaFab. More at the Kickstarter page and Barry Beams website.
Colin McCaleb
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frank
frank
11 years ago

“Quoted power is 1400+ lumens”

“The brightest setting gets you about an hour at 1200 lumens”

Which is it?

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Nick
Nick
11 years ago

You should see this guy’s squirrely dodging of realism on the candlepower forums where lighting experts tear him apart for the snake oil this is.

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Jim
Jim
11 years ago

“Quoted power is 1400 + lumens”

Same as the (impressive) L+M Secca 1400 – if claimed lumens figure is accurate.

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Mark
Mark
11 years ago

The short movie on their website only shows the light is blinding others, for doing that you don’t need 1200 Lumens…

Let them first finish the design, before showing off with specs. And get rid of the stupid flash settings.

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Colin McCaleb
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Colin McCaleb
11 years ago

Frank — apologies for the typo. Fixed!

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SeanK
SeanK
11 years ago

Mark – “And get rid of the stupid flash settings”

Obviously not a man who rides in traffic – flashing mode breaks you out from the landscape of light sources on the road and it dramatically decreases your energy consumption

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carl
carl
11 years ago

Agreed about keeping the flashing mode….. it’s what you need for night time urban survival, BUT, six different levels? Is that just because they can?

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Zod
Zod
11 years ago

Does not touch the ShartLight-2000……..KNOW THIS

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B
B
11 years ago

I’m starting to wonder if there’s even anything on Kickstarter other than bike lights 😉

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Editz
Editz
11 years ago

Assuming the claims are accurate, here’s to hoping this is a wakeup call to the rest of the bike light industry for better optics.

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Andre
Andre
11 years ago

I agree with Nick–for those of you interested in finding out more about Mr. Barry, there’s a thread on CandlePowerForums under the Transportation Lighting/Bicycle section (down near the bottom) where the man himself joins in on the discussion to go on an offensive against people wanting clarification about issues they see in his design and beam profile, accusing them of “slandering” his patented work. Also contains informative discussion on asymmetrical beam lights.

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Nick
Nick
11 years ago

Also, it should be noted, the headline on this article includes the phrase “replicates car headlight.” Lets make no mistake about this. *IF* this light approaches 1400 lumens (which is made increasingly doubtful when you read the candlepower forums thread), it is still far far short of modern automotive lighting.

A very basic 55w H1 bulb that forms the basis of countless automotive headlights makes upward 1400 lumens for *1* and of course cars have two (plus additional high beams in many applications). There are also boosted-wattage versions of these lights making over 2000 lumens each as well as many other types of automotive headlight bulbs producing between 1200 and 2400 lumens each. The ever-more-common HID capsules produce in excess of 3200 lumens each in the 35w variety (and there are increasingly more examples of 50w setups out there which crank out around 4500 lumens each).

This also ignores the fact of optics which are VASTLY more developed on a car. Also, larger optics (like you’d have on a car) allow for higher efficiency and beam pattern control.

The color of the light will be horrendous, making it less useful for the human eye than a better color (you know he’s using the bluish-colored LEDs because of his brightness claims, which really narrows down the range of applicable LEDs that could be used)

Combine all this and the barry beams is hopelessly far behind a car in terms of lighting. That shouldn’t be a problem for most cyclists since they don’t travel at car speeds in general, but I do think its absurd to compare this to any automotive headlight made in the past several decades.

Great for a bike light? Maybe, we’ll see if it pans out (you can buy excellent 1200lumen bike headlights right now for $300). Comparable to a car headlight system? Not even the same friggin ballpark.

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Barry Burr
Barry Burr
9 years ago

Hey everyone, I invite you to take a look at my website, http://www.barrybeams.com , to see the current state of progress.

I also invite Bike Rumor to test and review my retail product that Barry Beams is now going to market with.

Funny to read Nick the know it all, a few years after his flaming. Raw lumen count is not a measure of a directional light, or every light would be the same. Field lumens and base lumens are better for directional lighting, and an integrating tube give more representative measurements than the integrating spheres like MTBR.com uses at Light and Motion’s labs.
Raw lumen counts are properly suited for uniform lighting like indoor light bulbs.

Though he could ask and get any lighting they want from any light maker in the world, the best distance racer in the world and holder of the world’s 24 hour record, Christoph Strasser made a special request to use my lights for RAAM this year, and for that to be exclusive without me sponsoring any other solo RAAM racer.

Candlepower forums may have self appointed supposed experts. None of their speculations match the optics that were granted a patent in 2014.
Currently also am in discussions with a major auto LED lighting control systems maker.

I think Editz had it right, at my current state of progress, now going to market full scale with a finally finished retail boxed product, “this is a wakeup call to the rest of the bike light industry for better optics.”
With my optics leading the way in this direction, other light makers can license from me for far lower cost then they could try to develop their own optics that wouldn’t infringe on my patent.

Most recently, NASA tested off the shelf Barry Beams, and found 40% better down range object recognition than other optics they’ve tested. Resulting from that testing, NASA wants to move forward with using Barry Beams lighting for the Lunar Prospector Rover that will be searching for water on the Dark Side of the Moon where light hasn’t shined in three billion years.
To me, NASA’s test results are a better statement of my beam’s superiority than commercially influenced websites and the wildly ego motivated factually weak comments found on internet forums, who are jealous of others instead of trying to to shoot for the moon and succeed, like I’m doing.

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