NiteRider unveiled their new, higher powered Pro series lights mid-summer. We’ve actually had their top of the line Pro 1400 for a bit and taken it for some rides, but we’re not quite ready to give up the full review…we need to get a few more riders to test it out so we’ve got a well balanced pool of opinions.
In the meantime, we can show you what NiteRider’s Pro 1400 mountain bike light comes with, what it all weighs and the beam pattern. Jump on past the break for the goods…
Everything that comes with the Pro 1400 comes packed inside this travel bag.
Once you’ve pulled it all out, good luck getting everything back in there snugly. The good news is you really don’t need to. The charger will likely just sit on your desk or table at home.
Here’s what you get for $649 – dual quad-LED light head, charger slot, power brick, battery, battery holder, extension cable, helmet and bar mounts, instructions, USB cable and carrying bag. The charging cradle doubles as the sync to your computer (though it won’t charge off USB power), which lets you use their D.I.Y. Software on a PC (Windows 2000 and up, not Macs unfortunately) to let you fully customize the power output to your liking. Basically, you can mess with individual brightness levels for the flood and spot bulbs to get the best combination of brightness and run time.
The light head (196g) has a short cable designed to be used directly with the battery sleeve if run on your handlebars, or the extension cable if using it on your helmet.
Battery pack with sleeve: 593g.
The battery slides out of the sleeve to charge, so you can leave the sleeve attached to your bike if that’s how you roll. Even if you run the battery in your pack and the light on your helmet, you need to use the sleeve since that’s what the cord comes out of (not directly out of the battery).
The extension cord is 49g.
Helmet mount: 48g
Bar mount: 75g
System weight with extension cable and helmet mount: 886g
System weight with bar mount and no extension cable: 864g
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Above is the beam pattern on our local trails, shot at the same time we did the beam pattern photos for our review of the Light & Motion SECA 1400 if you want to compare. Compared to the new SECA, the NiteRider Pro 1400 has a more prominent spot light in the center of the illumination, which unfortunately isn’t captured at all in the photo above. The photo does, however, capture just how bright the light is…it’s pretty well ridiculous.
The flood light is broad, and the spot is pretty focused. You can totally ride with either one alone (pumping out a respectable 700 Lumens apiece), but I ran them with both on high most of the time. After the first ride, which was somewhere around 90 minutes, I let the system sit overnight, then turned the lights on high to drain the battery (recommended before your first recharge). The lights stayed on for about 2 more hours…on high…putting the total run time around 3.5 hours. Claimed run time on high is only 2.5 hours, and a few other reviews we’ve read suggest you can expect similarly long run times. The downside, at least if you’re hoping to recharge this thing between laps at a race, is that a full recharge can take 4.5 hours (claimed…I haven’t timed this, but it does seem to drag on).
Out of the box, the NiteRider Pro 1400 is set to alternate between full flood, full spot and full both, and that’s how I’ve been running it so far. The next step is to play with the D.I.Y. and add a flash mode, which means I have to boot Parallels and Windows on my Mac, which I hate doing. We’ll pass it around to a few other testers, too, then get cranking on our full review.
