RRP £650, ouch! With Lupine readying the Betty for an upgrade to Cree XP-G R4's, were I looking, I'm not sure I'd be buying this NR, even though it should be able to hit quoted output.
You're probably right, with brighter LED's, Lupine are bound to charge even more, though the LED's themselves probably only cost a few cents extra each. At RRP £700, the current Betty is not so far away. I think any UK NR distributor will have to discount a bit more to make them attractive.
as a light great, at that price, very hard to justify, i know that they are not made in huge numbers, and the attention to detail is really good, the custom armour, the software, the total packaging of the lights, all seem to be excellent.
i guess the only problem we all have with lights is that its hard to really see the application of them, if you want a mountain bike suspension fork, you have to buy a fork, and for alot of people a £300 fork works fine, guess its that same with lights through you can go ultra cheap with torches and get a similar result without all the bells and whistles for £100
as i am now building myself a set of double p4 Lights i know the costs involved. but then a compnay does have to make a profit and i bet we would all be horrified to know what the cost of manufacture is in say a specilised frame, and then what the RRP would be.
I note that a certain large bike shop chain is discounting the Pro 1200 already, although they don't appear to actually have any. And £584 is still fairly spendy
i bet we would all be horrified to know what the cost of manufacture is in say a specilised frame, and then what the RRP would be.
There're many more costs than those directly incurred by manufacturing.
oh i know, the development costs will be large behind such a project, but then they have intentially gone out to make a light with every bell and wistle, The fact that you can tune the light output is a good gimmick, but all of the control chips have to be programmed to set the frequency and the period that the light is on for before use, they are only frequency generator chips, when they say the light is dimmer what they are actually doing is strobing the light with a shorter on period, attach a scope to one of these things and you can see the pulse trains.
all nightrider have done is redo the programming software that these chips used and give an interface to allow the chip to be programmed at home, normally these things are done in the factory before the chip is fitted to the circuit board but chip packages and interfaces are commercially available to allow these chips to be altered once fitted to equipment.
Really what nightrider have done is taken the technology that has been around in electronics for ages and applied to to a bike light. and made a great light, i guess that they are so bright that the ability to angle each one seperatly is no longer required, something i always found usefull when using double beam setups.
