Thanks for tuning in today we're going
to be reviewing the Magicshine Monteer
8000S bike light.
One common question we often get with
bike lights is how many lumens do I need.
the answer that depends on where you
ride and how the light is designed.
However today that answer is going to be
8000 with the new Monteer
8000s bike light. This puts out a
ridiculous 8000 lumens
and as part of their new Monteer lineup
which includes updated batteries and
updated lenses.
Packaging wise really nicely done you
can see you have the black and orange
color scheme
that's characteristic of Magicshine. You
have a nice glossy sticker
of the actual light and it's really
hefty
nice cardboard box. Let's go ahead and
open that up and while I do that we'll
go over these specs.
This is the top of the line version
of the Monteer
lineup and that comes in at $400 dollars.
It has a garmin style mount which is
something
Magicshine's been doing a lot lately
and it's a really nice way to share the
light on multiple mounts. It has a five led
design
to achieve that amazing 8000 lumen
output
has an aluminum out and front mount
included which is a nice perk. It has a
full aluminum housing as well as the
large MJ-6118
battery pack this is their largest
battery pack. It has
7.2 amps and it's
10000 mAh output so very beefy.
Now in terms of what comes in the box we
get the head unit itself which is
surprisingly small,
You would think it'd be a lot larger
for the 8000 lumens. What isn't small is
the battery pack this thing is quite
large.
You get two straps to mount that onto
your frame and
you get the out and front mount. This is
not the Magistine TTA, it's a stubbier
version but aluminum
single sided. It looks like you could
put something on the back side if you
have the bolts and puck. You
get multiple spacers to accommodate
different handlebars
and you get the plug wire. This is pretty
cool so the battery pack has a
detachable
plug that clips in and this is the round
black style plug not the orange
plug we've seen in some of the newer
Magicshine lights.
You also get a USB C to USB Type a connector to
charge the battery pack
and a little allen key here to install
the out front mount as well as a little
manual.
Now let's take a look at the weight of
this bike light setup.
First we'll start with the battery pack
which is going to be the heaviest
portion of this.
We have the two straps as well as the
plug which you need to
connect it to the light that all comes
in at 422 grams.
So pretty hefty but a lot of output and
that's why
the light is able to have such amazing
run times.
The front mount which is a nice aluminum
construction comes in at 34 grams
while the headlamp itself comes in at
144 grams.
[Music]
Now let's take a look at the fit and
finish of the Monteer 8000S.
Now if this light looks familiar to
you it's because it shares the same
housing
as the existing Monteer 6500.
With the new Monteer lineup they've
updated the LEDs
as well as the battery pack to put out
more power.
This is the top dog this is the 8000S,
they also have a new 6500s
as well as lower models such as the 3500.
Now what's really surprising about these
lights is that they're so tiny
especially with the wired setup the
headlamp itself you can see fits in the
palm of my hand
and it's fairly lightweight given the
five led design
it's because they're able to offload all
the battery management stuff
to the battery pack itself and then just
worry about thermal
heat management and heat sinks with
the headlamp itself. This also means you
can
mount this on your helmet pretty easily
as it's fairly light and you can just
run the wire down.
Jumping right into it let's go over
the new lens design,
so it's a five led design and as with
the previous Monteer you can run this in
two different modes the top
row which is the flood lamps
and then the bottom two which are two
flood leds.
It's a little bit counter-intuitive as
you can see the bottom
two leds have this dimple design that
makes the beam a little more diffuse
however that's because the top lights
leds have a
32 degree beam spread so you get that
more flood effect
while the bottom two are 21 degrees. Now
you can run this with the bottom two,
the top three or all together in the
hybrid mode.
The led models here have been updated as
well the top uses three
Cree XHP 50.2
while the bottom two are XLM2 models.
Now as a mountain bike mountain biking
light
is really designed to throw a lot of
light with a really nice spread beam
so you're not going to see any diffusers
here or any beam cut off so if you run
this on the road there's a ton of glare
on here.
Now the housing although it looks
familiar it's really nicely made
so it's aluminum design you have little
fins here for heat dissipation
it has a IPx5 rating as well so nice
waterproofing.
You have the lens itself reset slightly
behind the housing
so there are no side cutouts here unlike
a lot of commuter lights which would
have a side cut out for better side
visibility.
A pretty simple design so very compact
the fins extend all the way down and the
best feature obviously is the Garmin
mount
this lets you use any standard out in
front mount without having to use
proprietary mounts from different
manufacturers. This is something that Magicshine
is really
done with all their new lights and
something I hope other manufacturers
will pick up as well.
Now the interface on this is also
carried over from the previous Monteer
6500 a single button interface.
It's also illuminated so this will go
from green,
red to blinking red and that'll let you
know if the battery is between 21 to 100
percent
six to 20 or zero to five.
Now the interface is a little bit clunky,
it's a single click to turn it on
double click to switch between top and
bottom and then a long hole to turn it
off with a single click.
Inside a mode to cycle through them and
we'll go over that later with the light
output.
Now the battery pack is another really
cool feature here,
this is the largest and most powerful
Magicshine has offered to date.
It's still the same model numbers but
it's been updated to use
21700 lithium ion cells
so that means there's four batteries in
here and that combined gives you a
10kAh milliamp capacity so really large
and with the new cells it's very compact.
Really nice build quality here and you
can see it also has USB Type-C
charging another really nice feature. So
if I pop off the top
you can see you have a nice rubber
gasket and then USB Type C on top
as well as a little battery check thing
here so it's
nice you can actually see another three
level
or perhaps four level to tell you what
the battery's at.
You can also use this as a power bank
that's
the nice feature as you can detach the
wire connector portion so the bottom of
this
if i pull off the little rubber cover
this one I snap on.
This is what to attach to the bike
headlight but if you're not using this
as a bike light
you can simply unclip this put the dust
cover back on
and then use this as a power bank to
charge your other devices.
There's three basic modes of operation:
spot, flood or hybrid where spot is the
bottom two leds flood is the top three
and hybrid is all of them.
It's not very obvious especially when
you put them side by side.
Spot is a little bit more focused than
flood but when you're riding it's very
hard to distinguish.
There are also 15 different output modes
for this light so you have four
different intensities for each of the
modes.
You have eco, low, medium, high as well as
a flash mode
so you have quite a few options that can
really tailor to the ride. The beam
quality is really excellent on this it's
very wide
no hot spots good distribution and
really far throw
so whether you're doing downhill racing
or just commuting on the street
this has more than enough light to keep
up with you. The other thing that's great
about such a powerful light is that even
the low settings put out more light
than most commuter lights and they still
provide you over 10 hours of runtime
so it's something you can run at low
settings for a really long time
so a lot of functionality here. We're
most impressed with the full hybrid mode
which throws a lot of light
you have good side distribution and
really far throw.
The full 8000 lumen is also really crazy
it really lights up the road and it's
overkill for most purposes.
The flash mode here also is quite
disturbing especially at 2400 lumens.
Now when you're riding again it's pretty
hard to distinguish what mode you're in
and as you can see the flash mode is
very distracting and can mess with your
depth perception
otherwise it's pretty simple to cycle
through the modesi. We found low
and even eco were sufficient while the
higher settings were
almost too bright for most riding but
the 8000 lumen is quite impressive as
you can see here
it really lights up everything and it's
really impressive. It's quite fun to ride
at night especially with
something like the 8000s attached to
your handlebar
otherwise it's really easy to switch
between modes and provides more enough
distribution to really see things to
your side and ahead of you.
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Now let's do a little comparison
between the Monteer and some other
bike lights on the market.
As you can see here I have many of the
Magicshine variations.
The MJ-908, MJ-906 and the Eagle F3
as well as the associated battery packs
to show a comparison as well as some of
the commuter lights like the Allty 2000
and the Fenix BC21R v2.
Right off the bat I have both
Monteer 8000S and the 6500S.
You can see they're the same so same
housing
essentially they just changed the output
on these
with these you get the same battery
packs as well while the lower Monteer
variations
use a smaller battery pack. So they're
simply programmed to put out more power
further beam and maybe a little lens
modification as well.
So right off the bat comparing these to
your standard commuter light
you can see commuter lights with the
batteries actually
integrated within the headlamp you end
up with a larger
headlamp compared to the Monteer. It's
almost half the size as you just have
the heatsink
and the leds so that's one big advantage
of this
and you can get a lot more output while
these are usually limited to under 2000.
Here's the Allty 2000 you get the OLED
screen which is something I wish the
Monteers had
but again a lot bigger same Garmin mount
but you can see just a lot larger form
factor but
obviously all in one design means you
don't have to lug around a big battery.
Now comparing this to some of other
Magicshine
mountain biking lights. This is actually
my favorite the Eagle F3, it has
a four led designs same idea though you
have the same
flood and then the spotlights. You can
see similar form factor
the F3 is actually bigger, they have a
two button interface and a more obvious
battery indicator so that's a nice plus
of this
and a bigger heatsink design. It's
actually surprising that the Monteers
have such a small
form factor as you would think the heat
would actually require larger fins but
actually they work pretty well despite
the smaller size.
So you can see they've really
improved the build quality as well
where this is all plastic this is full
aluminum and really clean.
Now some of their newer MJ lights this
is the
906 so you get the 5 led design
this puts out i think about 3200 lumen.
You can see smaller form factor but a
little bit taller
and again more plasticy and it uses
their old rubber style mounts.
I think the newer ones actually have
switched to Garmin which is a better
design.
Now if an 8000 lumen
Monteer light sounds familiar it's
because they actually have an 8000
lumen
MJ-908. This was a theoretical 8000 lumens
though so you don't actually get that
but a much larger form factor you can
see.
Almost double the size it's all heat
fins which is something again i'm
surprised not to see here
and larger overall taller wider you do
get the
led screen which is really nice so you
can see which mode you're in.
With the Monteer you don't really
know which mode without peeking over
but definitely nice to see more output
more real measured output versus
theoretical
in a smaller form factor.
The other thing i really like about the
updated Monteer lights especially with
the
6500s and the 8000s is the battery packs
have improved.
Previously they use the 18650
lithium-ion battery packs this had six
batteries in here
so you can see three here three here
it's heavier
and chunkier.
They also had a even larger one
this is the MJ-6090 so you can see really
large it
essentially takes up your whole water
bottle cage but it had a nice removable
mount here but very heavy.
It has more capacity than the
other battery packs we're looking at now
it has 10.4
versus the 10.0 that we see with the
Monteers but you can see quite a bit
bigger. Putting these side by side you can
see
they've really slimmed it down i made it
easier to carry
and with the removable plug you can
see how it's not removable.
That's what i really like about the
new Monteer battery pack, you can simply
pop this out put the dust cap on
and then just stick this in your pocket
carry a spare one if you're on the road
or use this as a power bank.
[Music]
Now let's go over the pros and cons for
the Monteer 8000S. What we like about
the light is that it's ridiculously
bright, it's honestly overkill but it's
awesome to have such a bright light
especially at this price point.
It's really hard to find another $400
light with 8000 lumens.
It's also really nice to see the usb
type-c charging for the battery pack
which lets you use it as a power bank
when you're not riding.
Overall the build quality is also
excellent with durable wiring
connections which is often a weak point
for
a wired battery pack setup. Some of the
cons for the light is the fact that it
lacks DRLs,
that would have been a nice feature for
daytime riding.
Also it's very annoying to have to cycle
through the flash modes and nobody
really needs three different flash modes
for this light.
It can be quite jarring especially if
you're going through corners so you have
to be prepared when you're riding to
cycle
out of it really quickly. Also it lacks a
remote for a helmet mounting
which means it's not very practical to
mount this on your helmet even though
the lamp head is quite light. Hopefully
the next generation will have that
feature though.
Taking that in everything to an account
would give the light a 8.9 out of 10.
In a lot of ways this is the muscle car
bike lights,
it's just a lot of power and low tech.
You don't get any bluetooth connectivity
or cell phone apps
it's very simple a very honest setup and
even though it is overkill
nobody needs 8000 lumens it's really
fun to ride with at night.
So if you're looking for something with
really high output this is a great
option.
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This is the sweet cyclist reminding you
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