http://sportsmansparadiseonline.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlight#LED_light_sources

I’m not sure why you find it such a problem to be honest – if it’s on road then the rider is being stupid using high-brightness lights on the road (though some would say it’s about the only way of getting drivers to realise you’re there) and in the woods there are bugger all people about and no-one to upset.

My homebuilt E-bike light has just three Luxeon III LEDs, but I’ll bet it beats this one for ‘throw’, yet gives plenty of close range light too. 50mm dia. 2 degree Carclo optic (apparently no longer made) for long range (Up to about 100 yards /meters), and two 20 mm dia 25X6 degree elliptical optics for spread and close to medium range. Each LED can be used independently depending upon conditions / power conservation. With all three running, about equivalent to a single halogen car headlight on ‘bright’, but only requires 15-18 watts for maximum brightness.

Next one I build will use Cree or Seoul Semiconductor LEDS for greater lumen per watt efficiency, although unfortunately that wonderful Carclo 2 degree optic isn’t quite compatible with the Crees or SSes. May have to experiment with aspeheric lenses to get that long ‘throw’.

The BMW Xenons have an auto-leveling system which directs the headlights down when the suspension angle changes so you don’t blind other drivers. They’ve been doing this since ’97 and it’s really nothing more than a fixed lever arm which signals a servo motor. Perhaps something that could be added to this to keep from blinding others and the added benefit of having light stay where you’re biking, even over uneven terrain…

if anyone needs more reflector links: for the bar shaped part i’m thinking of either this one http://dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.1919 or that one http://kaidomain.com/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductId=1788
i got both, they are o.k. i glued reflective aluminum tape to the back of the glass reflector, which helped with wasted back spill and made them somehow “softer”.

And I’m a bit on the fence, I’m disappointed that you apparently need such laws with idiots that pull stunts like this, but on the other hand I don’t like too many rules and I think even the maker of this would run around all night with these lights, it’s more a bragging thing to show on sites surely? In which case it’s OK I’d say, you just dont’ want tons of people actually using this kind of thing, in fact when a certain kind of xenon or something standard bicycle light became popular in my area I was already annoyed as hell at being blinded all the time, the damn things also were predominantly pointed up rather than down for some reason.

Checkout http://www.georgehernandez.com/h/xzMisc/Color/Media/EyeSpectralAbsorption.png also, makes the differences a bit more obvious but…

Yes, to some extent a smaller quantity of blue would indeed make sense, but for the fact that we have bugger all blue receptors (something like 2% of total, and mostly scattered all over the retina) makes focusing on things illuminated in blue-only light much more difficult than red-only apparently.

Our main problem is that we can’t really control the levels of brightness, one second it might be reflecting off white limestone, the next off dark soil. Because of this we tend to prepare for the worst case (dark soil in a dark wood maybe) and so we just blast out a blue light to match that, but this “smaller” illumination (so as not to bleach the rods) needs to be carefully controlled, whereas red doesn’t and provides better focusing (or rather resolution) due to between 50 and 75% of your cones being red.

Did any of that make sense? It’s 3AM here!

Maybe a combination of red and lower intensity blue? Red is fairly odd to ride with. But either are theoretically better than white. Worth a test, if you get spare time/LEDs. I’m currently tracking down some 3W reds and blues to test them both out.