Moon Comet-X Pro

The Moon Comet-X Pro front light is a well-engineered, long-lasting choice for being legal and visible on urban roads.

At £31 the Comet-X Pro costs about a fiver over its non-Pro stablemate, and for your cash you get twice the brightness, the daytime flash mode jumping from 120 to 240 lumens, with an advertised run-time of nearly 24 hours.

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With a solid-on maximum of 120 lumens spread across a wide arc, the Comet-X Pro is never going to be the light you'd use for back lanes on a dark night, and it's not trying to be that. The strip form factor is all about giving as wide an arc of visibility as possible, not the speed-enabling distant throw of a spot beam. That said, 120 lumens is certainly enough to get you down a darkened driveway or out of a pub car park after a few refreshments.

The overall package screams 'commuter' – the well-machined and beefy mount arms pivot on both sides to accommodate any bar shape, from narrow to fat to aero, and you can adjust the left/right angle of the mount with a screwdriver. Stretch the chunky rubber band in place and it's rock-solid, yet can be pocketed in a second at the shops or bike rack. The light itself clips on and off the mount in either orientation, so you can run it parallel with your handlebar or vertical, if you need to make room for hands, other lights, computers and so on. It clicks in place with a solid, positive action and I never feared for the light's security over the roughest of roads.

On the back is a rubber power button that doubles as a low-battery warning and charging indicator, turning blue when juice is low or when charging up. The microUSB port is set deep under a hefty rubber bung, and I did find a few cables that didn't want to seat home enough to charge.

Though pigeonholed as an urban utility light, the Comet-X Pro worked fine on rural road rides, snuggling betwixt bar tape and stem, affording a run-time that meant I never worried about it running out on long rides. Some traditional bullet-shaped light mounts can become a bit snarled in the cables exiting under road bike bar tape, but the slim profile of the Comet mount and the ability to swap orientation to suit the clutter of computers and whatnot meant this wasn't an issue.

Cycling through the modes and powering on/off was as you'd expect – press once to enter the last mode, twice quickly to swap between solid and flashing, and more presses to swap brightness levels in each mode. Long press to turn off with a quick fade to off (nice touch), and it turns back on in the last-used mode.

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As advertised the light has four flashing modes – 1, 2, 3 plus 'Double Blast' – but I could only find three; as the brightest of modes is measurably slower and brighter than the other two preceding, I'll go with that one being 'Double Blast'.

In terms of effective brightness, for £30 the Comet-X Pro is somewhat into the 'actually attention-grabbing' as opposed to 'legally compliant' genre, but is not what you'd call 'bright'. Compared with my go-to Lezyne PowerDrive XL in its lowest-power flash mode (150 lumens), the Comet-X Pro's 240 lumens were hardly noticeable beyond 100 metres – perhaps the key difference being spreading the power over 16 LEDs instead of through one with a focused lens. But then how often do you have 100m or more of sightline in an urban environment? In that case the wide angle afforded is the major value here. So no, this isn't the light for keeping you visible on shadowed country lanes – my utterly anecdotal test (Comet-x Pro placed on the roadside and driven towards at 60mph) proved that you need serious lumens to be picked up by your lights, and this strip design isn't the way to do it.

On balance, the Comet-X Pro is a cracking light for legal-compliance-bordering close-quarters visibility, with nothing of note to mark it down – but it's not for the open road.

Verdict

A brighter than usual urban be-seen-by light, with pretty good run-times and a solid bracket