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Philips Saferide 40 battery

Introduction, I wrote this before I tested the Saferide 40

I was disappointed by what Philips showed on Eurobike [ Sept. 2011 ] because I don't see much point in the 40 lux headlamps, and I don't see a change to their other lamps.

Philips could kill off all the competition with some small changes to their current lineup. They have the resources in electronics and manufacturing, and since 2009 they have the most important thing: The reflector for the Luxeon Rebel-LEDs as used in the Philips LED bike light (LBL) which kicks ass!

They should have done the following:

  1. Putting the battery externally of the LBL (so a smaller lamp head) would pressurize the competition of battery powered headlamps with cutoff a lot. Possibly offer different sized batteries or even include plugs/wires so people can do it themselves. Actually, the E-bike version of the LBL could be used for this purpose, it is also 80 lux but I'm not sure if the beam is as good and/or if light output is just as high. (Btw., I was told in the e-bike version the LEDs were changed from Rebels to Altilons, and the reflector was recalculated...)
  2. Making a dynamo driver for the LBL would give the best dynamo headlamp available, and they could undoubtedly sell tons of them. (this is for countries other than DE, or perhaps with my tricks as described on the StVZO page they could also get it StVZO approved)
  3. The plastic covering up the reflector should not be transparent top or covered by a part of the housing so that no light goes directly to your eyes.
  4. Use a different lamp mount.
  5. Using neutral white LEDs as I suggested to them...

I don't understand why they don't complete the designs to make them near perfect...

I am going to test the Saferide 40 though. If the beam is as good as the Q-Lite QL-269 in low-beam then it could be very useful because that has few artefacts and a very wide and quite even beam. If the Saferide 40 has such a beam it could be good.

Specifications:

Mass: lamp with cable + mount: 107g., complete with battery holder + 4x AA batteries: 285 g.
171 g. including cable and mounting bracket with retroreflector.
Size: width: 64 mm, height: 40 mm (without mount), length: 71 mm.
LEDs: 1 x Luxeon Rebel, crystal white (apparently this is about 5500K, cool white, note that neutral white is ca. 3500-5000K according to e.g. Cree though some manufacturers put the top end of the range at 5500 K). The Philips headlamps are better w.r.t. light colour than many other headlamps, but they are still too cool, ca. 4000-4500K neutral white would be a lot better, as my tests have shown.
Wiring: .
On/off: The lamp has a button on top which switches: on, high, flash, off. The StVZO version doesn't have a flashing mode.
Price: € 69,-.

Pictures:

Philips Saferide 40 battery Philips Saferide 40 battery Philips Saferide 40 battery

Test

Tested: 28 Nov. 2011 - sometime early 2012

The light beam starts about 3 metres from the front wheel. quite even, lights up the road to about 35m. More on fully dark roads. This is better than expected, and compared to the QL-269 it lights up longer distances stronger. The beam is fairly wide, not as wide as the LBL but it quickly gets wider than many roads I ride on. Beam strength, pattern is far better than the horrible Cyo-40 (Nahfeld).

I like the beam shape of the Saferide 40 more than that of the Saferide 60, it's got almost no artefacts. Not that artefacts (outside the main beam) are bad per se, no they can for example prevent the feeling of being trapped in a tunnel of light. The Saferide 40 doesn't have an overexposure of the road surface around the front wheel which the Saferide 60 does have.

The Saferide 60 is brighter and the beam begins closer to the front wheel, the Saferide 40 has a wider more even beam.

The version I've got for testing is an engineering sample, even though production versions are already out, and I had some problems with it, which I suppose will not be present in the production version. I will go into that if/when appropriate. It's also got a flashing mode, which I generally do not like, as for taillamps it makes estimating distance just about impossible, and for headlamps this can kill someone else's night vision. This lamp has 3 on settings: Low, high, flashing. Low and high are too close together, I don't see the point of putting it in low. Perhaps the runtime is a lot longer in low mode, but I haven't checked that yet. If so, that would mean the high mode is actually the one that's pointless ;-)

I was having too many problems with this lamp and couldn't make beamshots anyway, so I cut it open to make some pictures of the insides. To be uploaded. One of the problems besides that it wasn't reliable from the start, was that the female plug in the batteryholder didn't work any more after a while. I wasn't careful with this lamp, such as picking up the batteryholder by the cable, but that's the sort of thing that will happen with it in actual use, and if it can't handle this, you will get issues with it after a while. I have some ideas & drawings for much better connectors by the way, if you're interested, Philips :)

2013-6-27: I'm not going to buy a new lamp for further testing because this lamp doesn't interest me enough.

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