- USE Exposure lights
- Race £265 Race set £325; Enduro £325
- USE
USE’s Exposure light system has attracted a lot of interest in recent months, with prototypes putting in appearances at major events and a lot of discussion going on. USE is an early adopter of LED technology. Don’t confuse these lamps with the little light that tells you that your PC’s switched on. While the Exposure LEDs work on the same principle, they’re hugely brighter and, of course, white. The advantages of the LEDs are greater light output per watt than halogens and very small size. Teamed with a tiny lithium-ion battery, USE has been able to pack the whole system into a cylindrical casing 100mm long and 45mm in diameter. The unit even includes the intelligent charger – the bit you plug into the wall is just a transformer, the light unit monitors the charge itself and flashes the lights to let you know how its getting on.
A neat aluminium clamp mounts to the bars and the light unit slots on and is secured with a small Allen bolt. When mounted, the bracket covers the charging socket and stops mud or water getting in. That does mean that you have to find an Allen key to charge the light up, and commuters won’t appreciate the lack of a quick-release bracket. A QR mount is, we’re told, in the works though.
The system is easy to use, with a single push-button on top. Push and hold to turn on, push once to switch between high and low power modes, hold for two seconds to go into flashing mode, push and hold to turn off. Simple. The whole thing looks very neat, and you can get it in a choice of anodised colours. The Race unit shown here claims a 2.2hr run time on high or 8.5hr on low – we got over two hours on high first time out with a new battery, so those look like good numbers. Most impressive is the weight – the whole system including bar mount weighs just 185g.
So how bright is it? Anyone who’s using their brain won’t be at all surprised that it’s nothing like as bright as an HID, despite what some more hysterical correspondents may have reported. USE claim that on high beam the Exposure is equivalent to a 32W halogen setup, but these comparisons are necessarily subjective. You can readily compare lumens per watt but that doesn’t take beam pattern or colour temperature into account. Exposure’s LEDs emit a very white light that makes halogens look very yellow in comparison, and this immediately makes them look brighter. For what it’s worth, here are some comparison shots of the Exposure system and a standard Lumicycle halogen setup with a 12W spot and 20W flood. The markers on the ground are 10m apart, with the first one 10m ahead of the bike.
| Exposure | Lumicycle Halogen |
|---|---|
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You can draw your own conclusions from this, but to our eyes USE’s 32W equivalent claim isn’t far from the money. It’s certainly considerably brighter than the 20W Lumi lamp. What we do notice, and this is even more obvious when riding, is the limitations of USE’s lenses. The light falls off quite rapidly in the distance, making a halogen spot a more effective tool at high speed – we found ourselves relying on (or wishing we had) a helmet lamp on fast descents. Because the Exposure system modulates the power to both lamps for high and low beam rather than having two completely different lamps, switching from low to high gives you generally the same shape of illuminated area but slightly bigger and considerably brighter. You don’t get a great deal of extra reach, though.
That said, the high setting is ample for nearly all situations. It’s certainly adequate for racing on the kinds of courses that get used for night-time racing. It might just be our eyesight but we really didn’t get on with the low setting. You don’t have to be going very fast at all to start feeling like you can’t see enough, which rather limits its usefulness. Then again, on familiar trails you don’t need to see all that much. And to be fair we always like to have a helmet lamp with any bar-mounted system.
We’re not totally convinced by USE’s chosen “battery low” signal – the unit starts to flash every few seconds, which is at best distracting. But it does its job and makes you switch to low beam as soon as you can. We got about another 20 minutes of low beam from that point. One of the key advantages of the Exposure’s architecture is that you can easily swap batteries out on the trail – just unscrew the back of the unit, pull the battery out and slide a new one in. Cunning design means that it’s almost impossible to get wrong – as long as the end of the battery with the contacts on goes in first, it’ll work. Additional batteries are £70 a pop, or the Race Set comprises the light unit plus an extra battery. That’s a great setup for 24hr team racing. Soloists or anyone with a penchant for nocturnal epics will be better served by the Enduro model, which uses an extended housing and contains a larger battery giving a claimed 5.5hr run time on high beam and still only weighing 275g all-in.
Positives: Tiny, light, secure, looks ace, adequate light, easy battery change, Enduro has epic run time.
Negatives: Lenses don’t make the most of the available power, distracting low-battery alert, no quick-release mount yet, expensive.
Verdict: The main selling point of the Exposure is compactness and light weight. Having a single small unit on the bars is a breath of fresh air after having your frame festooned with battery bags and lengths of wire, and for its oomph the Exposure is amazingly light. Performance-wise, the Exposure is adequate but not earth-shattering. A good HID setup will give you more output and comparable high-beam run times but will inevitably be heavier and less convenient. It’s really up to you to weigh up your needs. We like the Exposure, and we’ll like it even more when it gets a quick-release mount and some lens tweaking. There’s definitely a lot of potential in LED technology…
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