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Hope Vision R4+ review | Lights, Reviews | Muddymoles: Mountain biking (MTB) in the Surrey Hills and Mole Valley

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Hope Vision R4+ review | Lights, Reviews | Muddymoles: Mountain wanderlust (MTB) in the Surrey Hills and Mole Valley Menu Muddymoles Muddymoles: Mountain wanderlust (MTB) in the Surrey Hills and Mole Valley Cycling News, Reviews, Chat and Ride reports Important! The functionality on this website requires Javascript but it appears that either your browser does not support Javascript or you have Javascript disabled. This will stupefy your wits of this website and in some cases may prevent key features from working correctly. Hope Vision R4+ review Posted by JamesS, December 13, 2016 Leave a scuttlebutt I’ve just bought a Hope Vision R4+ which is unusual for me. Unlike many Moles, who like to regularly update their kit in an urgently managed way, my strategy is increasingly one of buy and hold. For example, pursuit my purchase of a Hope Vision HID (Endurance version) when in 2006 I just didn’t finger the need to upgrade my night riding illumination other than the wing of a helmet light a year or so ago. Until now that is. The Hope Vision HID has been a unconfined light, albeit a bit of a faff to set up and having no shower fuel gauge. I decided that without 12 years the Hope Vision HID had depreciated unbearable to be worldly-wise to treat myself to a newer LED light which would moreover be brighter and hopefully easier to operate and live with. Given the hassle of cables, connectors and batteries to nail I seriously considered one of the offerings by Exposure such as the Maxx-D. However, I couldn’t bring myself to pay the premium that these lights writ and with a special offer from a large trundling shop offering 10% off lights I decided to splash out on a Hope Vision R4+ with a 4 lamina battery. I guess I went for the Hope Vision since it seemed to offer a good wastefulness of reliable tautness and value. As the name suggests, the Hope Vision R4+ has 4 Cree LEDs and it is certainly very bright, delivering virtually 1500 lumens on full power. The R4+ and attachments are very similar to the original Hope Vision HID that I purchased many years ago, although it has been upgraded in a number of ways. In the box, in wing to the light and shower are a machined bar clamp, throne torch strap, helmet mount and extension subscription to enable the shower to be placed in a when pack when running the helmet lamp. So the light caters for just well-nigh all possible uses, although there doesn’t seem to be a victual buggy mount… The Hope Vision R4+ lamp is made from beautifully machined aluminium as you’d expect from Hope and well-nigh half the size of the original Hope Vision HID, with two sets of three output settings. These are accessed via a simple push sawed-off on the top of the lamp that is easy to use with a gloved hand, however there’s no remote so whilst the settings can be reverted when moving you do need to take one hand off the bars. Those two groups of settings are one set to ‘see’ and the other to ‘be seen’. Most of the time I use the ‘see’ or ‘Race’ setting which gives you 550, 1000 and 1550 lumens. You have to printing and hold to wangle the ‘be seen’ setting so there’s no danger of unwittingly selecting it when looking to quickly zombie up the power surpassing a technical section. I didn’t think I’d scarecrow with the ‘be seen’ setting but I’ve unquestionably found it to be spanking-new for using on the road sections without needing to worry well-nigh dazzling on-coming drivers, since plane on the lowest setting the race mode is too unexceptionable for the road. This is actually one of the unconfined features of the light and I’ve found myself using it frequently. The Hope Vision R4+ bar mount is a woebegone aluminium topic tying to the frame via two Allen bolts but although very similar to the old one that came with the Hope Vision HID, it now uses a bayonet fixing for the lamp unit. While the clutch is securely stock-still via the bolts, the light can be removed from the clutch hands which ways that if you are lucky unbearable to have increasingly than one velocipede you can purchase spare bar clamps to enable easy movement of the light between them in seconds. The clutch is designed for standard ‘oversize’ bars or skinny bars via a supplied spacer and is offset, enabling the lamp to sit directly over the centre of the bars whilom the stem clamp. This leads me to one of my small gripes with the unit and that is the clutch doesn’t work for 35mm bars, forcing the lamp to sit at a jaunty, off centre wile towards the thinner end of the bars. The lamp can be moved vertically on the clamp, but has no horizontal welding so it cannot be adjusted from this angle. The offset from pointing exactly forward isn’t platonic but is relatively minimal and doesn’t really impact its use as the whizgigging pattern is sufficiently wide. Hope theoretically do a 35mm clamp, but I couldn’t find one in stock and when I contacted Hope they weren’t particularly helpful, so I gave up. Since in my wits most mountain bikes now come as standard with ‘oversize’ bars it would be preferable if the clutch fitted 35mm bars and had spacers for narrower bars. Ho hum. The Hope Vision R4+ shower is covered in a rubberised untried bumper and a Velcro strap which is easy to nail securely to the frame, certainly much easier than the previous Hope batteries that were contained in a neoprene case. There are a number of shower options, including 2 cell, 4 lamina and 6 lamina options. There are moreover ‘endurance packs’ with 2 x 2 lamina batteries. The batteries moreover come with a ‘fuel gauge’ to see if you have unbearable shrivel time left to squeeze in that final run of the evening. You have to printing a little sawed-off on the battery, so when it is sitting on the underside of the frame it isn’t quite as idiot proof as the fuel gauge on the when of the Exposure lights that is right there in front of you and unchangingly on, but it’s still largest than not having one at all. Of course, what I really wanted was sufficient shower life to requite a good 3-4 hour ride and still have plenty of juice left so as to not have to worry well-nigh shrivel times at all. On this score, the 4 cell, 5100mAh shower of the Hope Vision R4+ gives a quoted shrivel time for the upper mode of 2 hours and 15 minutes. Other shrivel times aren’t quoted but I expect that shrivel time on the low ‘see’ mode is unescapable 6 hours and medium virtually 4. Given this, I figured that would be increasingly than unbearable for a typical 3-4 hour ride if I set it to upper on the descents and a lower setting for the climbs. The lower power ‘be seen’ modes presumably subtracting significantly more burn time. I didn’t want to have to mess virtually waffly batteries mid-ride and decided that the 6 lamina was overkill not warranting the spare expense or weight. Everything is a trade-off without all… On the subject of compromise, shower connectors are now push fit affairs. They are much quicker and easier to connect/disconnect but despite losing the security of a screw fitting it doesn’t seem to have compromised the robustness of the connection compared to the original HID terminals. Taking all these refinements into account, the combination of the bayonet lamp connector, easy to use shower connectors and easy to nail shower Velcro strap midpoint that while the Hope Vision R4+ isn’t as simple as the all-in-one shower and lamp style of the Exposure Maxx-D, the spare hassle and time required to set it up is so minimal that I don’t really notice. The big question though, is how does it perform? It’s early days but so far I’ve been impressed with performance in terms of shrivel time and light delivered from the Hope Vision R4+.Withouta recent 3 hour ride there was still virtually 50% power left in the battery. The light output is much harder to quantify without delivering out an wide-stretching test similar to that washed-up by the Moles many moons ago, however plane this suffers from the fact that a photograph with several seconds of exposure time doesn’t provide a fully well-judged impression of what you will get when using a light in anger, at speed, on the trail. All I can say is that the Hope Vision R4+ is very unexceptionable on the upper setting and illuminates plenty far unbearable lanugo the trail to travel at ‘trail’ speed, i.e. as fast as you can. It moreover has a good wide spread of beam. I’d say that the medium setting is still plenty good unbearable to ride a technical trail that you are familiar with at a reasonable pace. For me, the Hope Vision R4+ is relatively light, easy to use, offers a decent shrivel time for my needs and sufficient performance to alimony me riding my favourite trails through the visionless winter nights. Having the valuables of a successful British manufacturer provides peace of mind that it will protract to perform perfectly for years to come. In which case, I’ll see you in 12 years then… Filed under Lights, Reviews in December 2016Well-nighthe tragedian James has a growing family... of bikes! Be the first to scuttlebutt on ‘Hope Vision R4+ review’ We love to get comments from our readers. 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