I bought this to replace my Busch & Muller Ixon light, an excellent but expensive light. Like this one it's not super bright, but (as with all German lights, due to German laws) it has a tight "shaped" beam with a sharp cutoff on the top that is designed to put all of its light on the pavement in from of you instead of blinding people several feet above the pavement. Beams like this also concentrate the light output near the top of the beam (just below the cutoff) so that the more distant part of the road is illuminated the same as what's closer in front of you. Unfortunately the B&M light suffers from a German-overengineered handlebar mount that is fussy to use, and mine failed while I was riding next to traffic last winter, dumping it into the traffic lanes where it was run over by half a dozen cars. I really liked that light: it was just bright enough for commuting here in Minneapolis, where things are well-lit, it doesn't rain a whole lot of the time (you need more light when pavement is wet) during the dark months, and in winter the snow on the ground causes here to be tons of ambient light. If you ride in dry, relatively flat conditions, such a light is enough. For comparison, I used to live in Portland, OR, where the pavement is wet during the winter more often than not. My commute also took me over the West Hills, a 500-800 foot (depending on the route) climb, with a very high-speed 30+ mph descent. For that purpose I would need 4-8 times as much light as what these put out. Just pointing this out to clarify that bike lighting is NOT one-brightness-fits-all. I decided to try this light because it is similar in concept to the B&M, but vastly less expensive and easier to find since there are few importers of B&M products. The Pathfinder does have two advantages over the Ixon: 1. It is about half the weight. It is really light, by far the lightest headlight I have ever used. If you are a gram counter and just a minimalist light for the occasion you get caught out after dark, this may be the light for you. However I don't think the weight is a good thing, since it seems to go hand-in-hand with skimping on the size of the battery pack in it. 2. The mount is a simple rubber strap you pull around your handlebars and hook in. It adapts to any size bar without having to make adjustments, and seems heavy-duty enough to last for a few years of regular use. There's no separate mount you leave on the handlebar, also making it easy to move from bike to bike. I can install it in two seconds and remove it in half a second. Before I discuss the beam of this thing (which, you may notice, I'm reserving for the "disadvantages" part of the review), let me explain about these shaped beams. The intent is that the top of the beam should extend out as far as you need to see on the pavement, maybe 50-150 feet in front of you, much like a car low beam, with almost no light projecting above that to blind (or "dazzle", as the Europeans put it) pedestrians and other people on the road. If, like one reviewer, you only see a 4x5 foot patch of light on the ground, you are aiming it too low. Yes there will be a dark spot directly in front of your bike, but that doesn't matter once you're rolling. The brightest part of the beam is also fairly narrow so as not to blind people off to the side, but still have some light "spilling" off to the sides you you can see hazards to the side and to allow for cornering. Now the downsides. Some of these are big, at least for me. 1. The beam is just too tightly focused, even when you have it aimed high enough. Once you have it aimed right, the dark patch extends quite a bit further (5-10 yards) in front of the bike, much more than the B&M, and this means you have to readjust it for low-speed riding, like in parking lots. 2. The too-focused issue applies to what I referred to above as "side spill." There is almost none. The beam is slightly narrower than the Ixon as well, and with very little side spill I often have to really slow down for corners unless I'm right under a streetlight. 3. Battery life is inadequate for anything but short rides. The two-hour rating on High is optimistic. Mine sometimes dims to its low setting after about an hour on high, and by that point you don't get a whole lot more time on low (more on that below). You REALLY need to watch the battery meter on this thing and dim it to low before you think you should need to. 4. The low setting isn't low enough in terms of power consumption. it still consumes battery life at half the rate as the high setting. That means that once the battery level has dropped enough that it won't stay on high anymore, you've got at MOST a few minutes on low - and you won't even get that much time on strobe mode, which you might really need to get home safely and legally. For comparison, the B&M Ixon lasts well over two hours on high, and drops down to low while it's still got about 20% of its battery left - and the low setting only consumes one-fifth the power of the high setting. So if you forget to monitor your battery level, at least you aren't putting yourself in mortal danger. Even if you just leave the B&M on high and let it drop to low on its own, you've still got a couple hours left. And while one-fifth might seem not very bright, that's not the way the human eye perceives light. One-fifth of the light looks about one-half as bright to us, which means the B&M is still mostly usable. I might have to slow down a little bit on dark paths, but not that much. Not that much different in terms of usability than the Pathfinder on low, in other words. I really wanted to like this light, but it's going to end up as a backup unit. Too bad, but I see this with a lot of PDW products: they seem mostly well-designed, but with easily remedied flaws. And then the same model remains on the market, unchanged, for years. I wish these guys spent a little more effort on continuous improvement. I'd pay an extra 20 bucks for a light like this that had a slightly larger beam and twice the battery pack in it.
