MAGICSHINE MONTEER 8000

£369.99

SPECIFICATION Weight: 605g • Max lumens: 8,000 • Contact: magicshineuk.com

Magicshine’s Monteer 8000 should be renamed the Monster 8000 because it literally scares off any wildlife wandering around at night. It doesn’t quite have the 8,000 lumens claimed – you only need to compare the beam to the 2,500 lumens Seca Enduro to see this, but you can’t argue with the raw power.

Set inside the aluminium lamp unit are five Cree LED units – the top three sit at a wider 32°, creating a lot of peripheral light, whereas the bottom two have a narrower 21° beam spread to punch the light down the trail. The clamp holding the lamp unit has a Garmin twist-lock attachment, which lets you mount other Garmin-compatible devices during the day. You get a couple of shims for different handlebar diameters, but to make set up easier we’d like to see the attachment bolt the other way up, so you can get to it from the top.

The Monteer 8000 has three constant light modes – 100, 50 and 25% of full power, as well as a low-powered flashing mode. You do need to cycle all the way through the settings to get back to high beam, so some form of programmability would be a nice touch.

The battery is a long thin shape and attaches using two Velcro straps. These are silicone-backed, but we found the battery can be hard to mount on small frames or odd-shaped tubes. Underneath a rubber bung on the end of the battery is a three-light charge indicator and the USB port.

When riding rough terrain, the thin clamp does bounce around a bit, but there’s so much light on offer that it doesn’t really matter. Nor does it matter that you can’t angle the lamp up and down on-the-fly because this light will easily illuminate 100m into the distance. At the same time, it offers a really wide pool of light close in, so we could easily see stumps and any other obstacles. The light is not as crisp, so you also lose some definition, but the price per lumen is the best here.