Team Tested: Full-Beam Night Nemesis Review
It is that time of year again, you leave for work in the dark and come home in the dark, winter is coming! We could begin a hibernation, wrapping our bikes up for the winter, and getting stuck into the latest Strictly Can’t Dance, Plop Idol or Desperation Factor. Screw that! It’s time to dust of those lights and get out there in the mud and grime. Night riding is rad, there is simply nothing more fun than hurtling down your favourite trails in the dark, on the edge of the limit, wrapped up in your own personal orb of light. We have spent the last 14 months riding with a Full-Beam Night Nemesis, and going into its second season we bring you our thoughts on its performance.
Full-Beam are a British company based in Scotland, run by two guys who are super passionate about riding and innovation. Owners Marco and Marc have extensively tested their lights through many punishing Scottish Winters, and not only do they use the best components in their lights, but they also manufacture in the UK. Of course this level of craftsmanship does not come cheap, and at the time of purchase the Night Nemesis retailed for an eye-watering £550 (now retailing on their website for £330). Aware of the much cheaper alternatives we were keen to see if the additional premium could bring a performance advantage.
The Night Nemesis is ‘only’ a mid range light when it comes to Full-Beams performance scale, delivering a blinding 2500+ lumen output. The light is available in two options, a wide beam and standard beam pattern, and the output is user configurable, so you can tailor the light level to your personal preferences. By means of a simple switch you can choose 2, 3 or even 5 user configurable Light Level modes. For us, we chose to simply set 2 levels, low for climbing, and the highest output for going nuts on the descents. One push for bright, push it again for crazy bright. The battery pumps out enough juice for a 2 hour ride at full power and charges in 3 hours, a much longer run time is possible if you ease off for the climbs. We chose to test the wide beam as most of our local trails are slow and highly technical.
This light has not had an easy life, it has suffered a full Scottish Winter season, been passed around, raced, bounced round in a kit bag for months on end, rolled around in the ‘random stuff’ drawer and suffered numerous crashes. This sort of abuse normally plays havoc with electronics but the Full-Beam has been performed faultlessly. The battery still delivers 2 hours of run time at full power or 4+ easily if you are are smart with the output control. The spread of light produced is very bright and even, with no distracting hotspots or shadows. If you live in an area where speeds are very high the standard pattern would be better, but the wide beam is perfect for tight, technical trails. It feels like it would survive a nuclear blast, and not once has it blinked out.
Bottom Line
The Night Nemesis has been a reliable companion through the darkest months, not once has is faltered or blinked out. I cannot imagine why you would want more power, but Full-Beam have much more powerful option should you really want to turn the sun back on. The battery sits snugly in use and everything is perfectly machined and waterproofed, you can tell it has been built by riders. In use, the light pattern is so bright and even that you hardy have to back off at all in the dark, and the quality of the light is far superior to the cheaper copies which are often plagued with hot spots and bleached out areas. So, a faultless performance leaves room for only one criticism, with a wealth of much cheaper competition the high price must to be drawn into question. Of course, it is a shame that the Night Nemesis is not cheaper, but the costs involved in making kit of this quality in-house are very high. If your main focus is cheapness, these lights are certainly not for you, but if you want to bomb down dark trails at full speed during the winters and value kit that lasts many years with exemplary after sales, then the Full-Beam lights offer class leading performance and reliability, and come highly recommended.
For more information, check out the Full Beam website.
Words and Photos: Trev Worsey
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