Time was in N.A. one had to throw down big bucks at obscure purveyors for a German headlamp to get vertical beam cut-off. Well, not any more. I've been fooling around with three inexpensive lights with beam cut-off:
Owleye Hilux 30, $35 street price
PDW Pathfinder, $35 street price
Xanes SFL-01, $10 street price
All offer high, low and some sort of flash. The Xanes also has an emergency taillight function and an ambient light and motion sensing setting - more about that later.
The Owleye and Xanes claim to meet the German StVZO standard, the PDW claims a “Vertical Cutoff Beam”. The Owleye has a cleanly projected trapezoidal beam shape on the pavement, brighter at the top than bottom for fairly uniform illumination when projected on the roadway. The Xanes beam isn’t as well defined, but cuts off as advertised. The PDW throws a rectangle pattern on the pavement, wide but quite short fore and aft.
To give you some sense of these beams, here they are projected onto a
vertical sheet of printer paper held about a foot in front of the handlebars. You can see the Owleye is whitish, the Xanes a cooler bluish and the PDW a warmer reddish.
I don’t have a photometer. I put the three lights on a straight handlebar side by side, turned them on high, walked to the other end of my dark garage and looked back into the core of the beams. I’m trying to give back to the community, but don’t make me do that again - I’m still seeing spots! Anyway, when I first turned them on, the Xanes appeared the brightest, followed by the Owleye. This is in agreement with their advertised outputs. After half an hour on high, the Owleye was noticeably brighter than the Xanes. On my suburban streets, the Xanes and Owleye throw down plenty of illumination for me, the PDW is borderline. IMO none would be bright enough for trail riding or high speed descents. For street and path riding, the Owleye’s clean, well defined beam really makes good use of the photons it throws out.
All have built-in batteries, USB recharging and come with a short cable. They all have slide in mounts with strap-around rubber attachments to the handlebars.
The PDW winked out @ 1:53. Around 2.5 hours, the Xanes' 'gas gage' warning LED came on, and by that point it's beam was pretty puny compared with the Owleye's. Hmm, I'm guess it went into 'limp home' mode. At three hours, the Owleye went out, maintaining a bright beam 'til the end (regulated circuit?) After four hours, the Xanes was still 'glowing' - I dunno, maybe find your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night with it?
Both the Owleye and Xanes claim to be the smallest lights that meet the StVZO. As a practical matter, I can’t imagine anyone choosing one or the other of these tiny lights based on size. Just for fun, the Xanes eyeballs a little smaller. It weights 71g with mount; the Owleye 65g.
The Xanes emergency tail light function isn’t very bright. I suppose if one was carrying the Xanes as a back up head/tail lamp, and their main tail lamp pooped out, the Xanes would be better than nothing.
As mentioned, the Xanes has an ambient light and motion sensing setting. I’m not a fan. I had the lamp on this setting as I approached a streetlight followed by a shade tree, with a car coming in the other direction. I rode under the streetlight, and the Xanes went out. Then I plunged into the darkness under the shade tree, invisible to the oncoming car, for an eternity (measured in tenths of seconds) until the Xanes came back on. Besides, this setting is indicated on the light housing by a too bright, distracting blue LED. For normal use, I've done pretty well over the years figuring out for myself when I should turn my headlight on and off.