Fool Drivers Into Thinking You’re a Motorcyclist With The New Ultra Bright Light & Motion Taz 1500

As a taz 1200 owner who’s happy with the light, but not thrilled with the rubber strap mounting setup, I’ll pass. It is finicky to setup such that the front of the light doesn’t sag towards the ground, which gets old when you have to remove/reattach the light as a part of locking it up outside. It’d be nice if they’d offer a mounting option like the original Vega, where the bar clamp portion stayed on the bike.

Yeah..fool them into a gardrail because they can’t see..
Anything over about 300 lumens is far too much for road use. On the positve side though, Light&Motion make solid lights, and the amber “pace line” lights really are a great feature.

@BMW, a regular automobile headlight is around 1700 lumens, and they have two. It you point the bike light in the appropriate direction, then it won’t affect a motorist.

@Randall …but is this light shaped as well as car lights? If intended as MTB light too it probably has no cutoff, so impossible to light the road without blinding others. If it has the cutoff, no good for MTB through forrests…

I wish more of these self-contained lights could be mounted on the helmet so it would work better for off road use…

The problem with lumens is that it only tells you how much light (luminous power) is begin put out, not how intense the light is. It’s the intensity (illuminance) that is important, and that’s why light makers should be reporting their lights’ performance in lux (lumens/m^2). That’s also why you can’t make definitive statements about how well a 300 or 1000 lumen light works. That’s also why comments about how a 300 lumen light is worthless or how a 1700 lumen light will make drivers crash are pointless and without merit. Illuminance and the modulation of that illuminance in the beam is what is important.

+1 to what Greg in Ohio said. With a helmet mounted light, you can put the light where you need it, be it on the road or trail or away from drivers eyes.

@boo, I also have a Taz 1200, and was unhappy with the mounting system until I asked L&M about it. They showed me how to route the strap properly so that I could get it nice and tight. Check out this picture ( http://www.lightandmotion.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/thumbnail/400x/0dc2d03fe217f8c83829496872af24a0/t/a/taz__1200_2_18.jpg ). Now that I’ve started mounting it like this, the light handles commuting over cobbled, railroad ridden streets as well as mountain biking and cross rides with no problem at all.

So one fix to the bright unadjusted light putting too much light into drivers’ eyes is to, uhm, adjust the light. A poorly adjusted light with a cut-off will also put light into drivers’ eyes.

@Randall: “It you point the bike light in the appropriate direction, then it won’t affect a motorist” — this proves to be too difficult for most riders. Also, they have two headlights with higher outputs because they’re going much faster. Since you don’t ride your bike at 100+ km/h, you don’t need to be able to see as far ahead.

@Matt and @Collin S: No, there aren’t any StVZO-compliant cutoff beams at high-lumen output levels (the highest I’ve seen is 370 lumen from the Supernova Airstream). Because the Germans’ bicycle code basically dictates the German, Dutch and Danish markets, StVZO is the defacto worldwide standard by which high quality bike lights and generators are made. Why don’t you see high-lumen cutoff lights? Because when you have a cutoff beam with good reflectors and lenses, the light is efficiently cast down onto the road where you need it and not into the eyes of oncoming riders.

I have a 205 lumen StVZO generator powered headlight (Supernova’s E3 Pro 2), I live in a city (Seattle), and I can assure you that I get seen and likewise haven’t been swallowed by a pot hole or other road obstruction. The best part is that since my lights are permanently mounted, I never have to worry about theft of the lights or recharging the batteries. They’re always ready whenever I want. And the new dynamo hubs are extremely low drag and require little additional maintenance compared to any other high quality hub. I often forget I even have it. It’s just always there when you need the power.

Last, to Light and Motion (and all other bike light makers): there’s absolutely no need to have 1500 lumens with a modulated (read: strobe) mode… Unless of course you’re *trying* to blind oncoming traffic. Heck, there’s no need to have strobe modes at all. Cars don’t have strobe lights, yet the motorists somehow manage to recognize each other anyways… In fact, it’s an indisputable scientific truth that strobing makes it MORE difficult to determine depth and distance of the source – that makes fog even more dangerous. Encouraging riders to use the modulated modes on rainy or foggy days is borderline negligence.

That said, I like Light and Motion lights. I think their Urban 300 and Vis 180 or Vis 180 Micro is quite possibly the best battery powered light combination I’ve ever owned.

@Gunnstein: if a light without a cutoff is adjusted properly and subsequently doesn’t provide enough light to see the road ahead, it’s a poorly designed light. All reflectors and lenses are not the same.

My Ay Up lights work quite well. As for others I can’t say because I don’t have the reflector design specs in hand or a licensed copy of something like ASAP on my computer. I can say you don’t need a cut of, and the cut-off design in cars isn’t quite ubiquitous. But hey, I’m only basing my statements on optical design experience.

Certainly proper aiming takes care of a large part of the problem, as tilting the axis of symmetry of any symmetric reflector based illumination system would. Designing asymmetric reflectors and lenses would add to the improvement. Cut-off systems are only one option, not the only option for controlling light distribution.

http://www.breault.com/software/asap-features

@Psi Squared: Semantics. The point as far as cycle lighting goes is that the standard symmetric-cone-with-fuzzy-egdes is crap on the road. You need some form of upper limitation (what I call cutoff) to have reasonable light in the distance without blinding others. Whether you have a straight horisontal cutoff like e.g. the best B&M lights, or the entire light cone is vertically squished or some variation thereof, it amounts to the same for this discussion. But hey, I’m only basing my statements on riding bikes 😉

Gunnstein: maybe you don’t like Psi Squared’s tone, but the guy clearly knows his stuff. Optical engineering is a thing, even if you believe that your experience as a cyclist trumps all. And yeah, if you’re discussing reflector design for a headlight, an optical engineer might have some valuable input. You seem to be confusing the term “semantics” with “relevant knowledge.”

@JasonK: Strawmanning, don’t put words in my mouth. I’m not arguing his knowledge or optical engineering in general. I don’t even think any of us disagree on any stated facts here, only on the words used. We don’t mean the same by “cutoff” but we agree that road lights should be designed not to blind others, that was my point. I know my technical terminology is not precise on this subject 🙂

@TJ: yeah, I run the strap up through the hole and back down/over the nub like that. Maybe my handlebars are a few mm too small in diameter or something, or I really need to crank on that thing and use the next notch on the strap, I dunno.

I have the Taz 1200. I also have a Urban 550, Seca 700, and a Stella 200. The Taz and the Urban are the two I reach for the most out of all my LNM lights.

The Taz is a nice light, and nice beam. It does not have a great battery though, 1.5hrs on high is not much for a commute and especially a night ride around town. I still think it’s a great light and can not get over how smart the reflectors are in these lights. LNM did a great job again.