Speaking of blinding lights contrasted with useful illumination: Back about 2002 or so I bought NiteRider's then brand-new, state-of-art, truly dentist-level-price arc light system, headlamp and tail lamp (was the tail lamp an early LED? I forget). That thing was so bright that, when I rode down our residential street, oncoming cars more than once pulled waaaay over to the opposite curb; and one night, riding through the Fairgrounds on the way home, a cop yelled, "That is one bright light!" -- and we all know that cops are hard to impress.
But the beam was unfocused, and the nearfield brightness basically ruined distance vision. I got rid of it because the damned thing kept breaking, and went to the other side of the chart with 2 X 4-AA Vistalight or whatever it was $25 first-gen LED lights strapped to each fork leg; watts and lumens a fraction of what they replaces, but to my surprise and pleasure, providing as much useful illumination as the NR system costing 8X as much. The 1,200 lumen (high; 600 low) K-Lite is much the same, not as bright of course, but I do welcome this indiscriminate blanket of light when riding through bosque thicket-tunnels at night. Aside: philosophical musing; delete if you are of a purely practical mind. Speaking of "lumens" and even "lux" and "candlepower:" I was thinking about this recently; each of these metrics -- some more relevant to real night illumination than others -- are all indirect means (= "middle") of applying discrete quantity (this means "counting" because that is what you do with number) to something inherently non-quantitative by means of an intervening magnitude or continuous quantity; similar to describing "red" in terms of wavelength by means of a patch of red on the wall. "Illumination" in the sense of "how well does this let me see?" is non-quantitative and refers back to (resolves to) the primal experience of seeing at night; just as "red" inescapably means "this particular experience of seeing," and every subsequent definition ineluctably refers back to such primary experience, on pain of meaning nothing -- something often forgotten. So there. End musing. On Sun, Sep 6, 2020 at 11:44 AM masmojo <masm...@sbcglobal.net> wrote: > ... Yes, Lumens is not really relevant to overall visibility or the > ability to see at night and is merely a measure of Brightness or Intensity, > Overall visibility is represented by the LUX measurement which actually > measures the area of usable illumination. Most German manufacturers use > this rating system, but some manufacturers don't (to my knowledge) I have > some SuperNova lights that I like quite a bit and their advertising would > make it sound like they would scorch the surface of the earth, but they > don't really seem any brighter that my 70LUX B&M's!!?? All the ratings > that I see for them are in Lumens not Lux? > > One thing I always say and apologizes if you've heard it before, " 4 > things that should require an IQ test & don't: Getting a Drivers License, > Voting, Jury Duty, and buying a gun." Maybe you could add getting a > marriage certificate and/or having Kids? LOL > -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Patrick Moore Alburquerque, Nuevo Mexico, Etats Unis d'Amerique, Orbis Terrarum -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/CALuTfguTxT%3DvoFs2Qc1sCaY0-yQeU%3Dmeu6vqGnpBqQOnTizhbA%40mail.gmail.com.
