On Saturday, September 9, 2017 at 4:57:50 AM UTC+1, bob prohaska wrote:

...any guidance...

Bike lamps and particularly bike dynamo lamps are at the level of 6V VW dim/dip lamps, if you are venerable enough to remember those. They became that good, i.o.w. barely sufficient, only in the last ten years, with the advent of the reflector technology associated with the Busch & Muller Cyo. All the remaining failures of this lamp, and of hub dynamos in general, are traceable to silly regulations made by German legislators. In particular, the lamp doesn't throw high enough to see stop signs on country lane crossing where I live, because of the flat-top cutoff.

I have both high and low quality Shimano hub dynamos and SON. I wouldn't pay the premium for a SON, but the one I have was already on a bike I was getting a huge discount on, and I was already imposing on the dealer to swap out other parts more critical to my use of the bike. You don't need a better hub dynamo than the Shimano with replaceable bearings, whatever it's number is now. For city and town riding at night, and during the day if you want daylight running lamps, the Shimano is superior in that it comes up to speed faster than the very old-fashioned SON.

It's a mistake to think that daylight running lamps have a lesser requirement; DRL in fact have more stringent requirements. The BUMM lamps have DRL from separate LED, and miserable it is too, barely better than nothing, and perhaps worse it causes undue confidence in the rider. Since the main lamp LEDs have an essentially unlimited MTBF, I just switch my lamps on when the bike arrives and never switch them off again: I run the main lamps day and night. Careful: there's also an automatic day/night switching option, which looks like an extra cost, but the lamp with it is often the cheapest at the European discounters, so I buy that one, but carefully switch it out for good, forever, so that in daylight my lamps run full strength.

These BUMM lamps, front and rear, may be the best available at any reasonable price, and at least they aren't the sort of inadequate crap BUMM pushed until about ten years ago, but you should be aware that none of them have a blinking mode, another failure of imagination by the German legislators, though you can easily build electronics to add a flash mode. I used to run additional lamps for flash mode but no longer do because the Cyo lamps, running their nighttime mode in the day, are strong enough to be easily seen when the bike itself (it's British Racing Green) is nearly invisible in the shade of trees overhanging the road, a common condition here.

Finally, I have a Cateye taillight, No. TL-LD1100, which many thought the best battery rear lamp generally available, which runs 200 hours on a pair of AA batteries and has flashing modes. I never found anything that economical for the front of the bike, but a 200 hour life for even one of your lamps isn't a nuisance at the level of lamps that chew a set of batteries on every ride or every second or third ride.

On your question about the likelihood of improvements to hub dynamos, the answer is the sameoldsameold: The German legislators fixed the dynamo's output and there is no incentive whatsoever to improve it, only costs and protracted struggles with bureaucracy. In any event, BUMM and SON and the German lobbyists paid by Shimano and BUMM would be the big losers of any new legislative dispensation because currently by virtue of primacy they enjoy a near monopoly -- vide Sepp Ruf's sarcastic remarks about complaints that tests conducted on the products of competitors by the SON employee Andreas Oehler are at best suspect and more than likely worthless because of his involuntary bias: they wouldn't be so brazen about it in a better-regulated field with real competition. Nor can foreign competitors make radical innovations, because the German legislation results in certain expectations of OEM suppliers by all the big bike makers, who are the major market, not individuals like you'n'me. Sorry, but you're screwed before you start down that road -- and that also explains why James' hub dynamo is so little better than a SON or a Shimano, and why every tiny gain is shouted from the rooftops like they just discovered the Grand Unified Theory Einstein failed to discover: those designers had to keep looking over their shoulders at the German legislation.

Andre Jute
Luminous