1olbull
Riding Motor Since 1950
Gray Beard,
I am thinking in that bogie's review he only used the 8630s and they are NOT the HD Daymakers 7700144 & 7700145.
Look closely at the faces - the JW Speaker 8630 has two circular vertical lights at 12 & 6 O'clock with two rectangular lights at 3 & 9 O'clock for a total of 4 lights.
The Daymaker 7700145 has three circular lights at 12, 5 &7 O'clock with two rectangular lights at 2 & 10 O'clock for a total of 5 lights.
Additionally, I feel photographs of the luminance reflected off an uncontrolled surface of unknown contrast by a headlight does not equates with what the human eye can detect and then discern while driving/riding at night using the illuminance of its headlights, which diminishes as the distance from the source increases.
I for one would NOT choose my headlight based upon any photograph.
JW Speaker has provided pattern data for their 8630s which is very useful and similar to what I intend to test. The horizontal and lateral beam distances and the respective illuminance values for ONE headlight are given in metric values. Two would be an improvement but not nearly two fold.
In the low beam pattern below: At low beam 3 lux casts out between the 1 lux at slightly about 105 meters and the 5 lux at about 40 meters. So, 3 lux would reach out about 70 meters (229 feet).
If this is actually so, it is a huge improvement over the 70 feet produced by motorcycle H7 to H11s as measured so far. Very few motorcycles have been tested to date and this data base needs to be vastly improved.