Blackburn Countdown 1600 Front Light

As far as heavy duty single-unit front lights go, the Blackburn Countdown 1600 is a seriously powerful product that's well suited for use on unlit roads.

• Pros: Bright, good battery life, handy screen and usability, build quality
• Cons: Weighty, gets very hot on top setting

The Countdown 1600 gets its name from two places – its display screen that functions as a permanent reminder of how much burn time you have remaining on a given setting, and the whopping 1600 lumens of output that the two LEDs are capable of producing.

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That comes on the top 'Blitz' setting, which in testing yielded as near as makes no difference 1:20hrs of life when left alone, including the usual dimming as it heats up (more on that later) and reaches its end. You also get a 1200-lumen 'high' setting, plus 600-lumen 'medium', 300-lumen 'low', and pulsing and strobe settings that peak at 300 lumens within their respective cycles.

I liked the clear and bright burn time indicator, but what was curious was how pressing the arrow buttons to cycle through the settings (or pressing the power button to instantly switch between blitz and low settings) would result in an immediate drop of burn time – of up to eight minutes one time – despite only a few seconds passing.

I've no doubt that changing settings does cause a small drain in the lithium-ion battery, but a sap of eight minutes does seem extreme. This drain got less obvious as the battery burned down; it's also possible that this is the system simply adapting to the new setting and you end up getting the time back as it readjusts its prediction. But it is unnerving at first if you need, say, 1:15hrs of battery life to get home and it jumps from 1:20 to 1:12 just because you cycled through the settings.

To do that is very easy, with the directional and power buttons (all illuminated in blue) easy to see and to press even with gloves on. The power button also acts as a shortcut to engage Blitz mode.

The light is easy to slide on and clip into the supplied sturdy bracket too. The bracket itself is really designed to be a semi-permanent fixture through the winter and is certainly suitable for off-road use, although you can easily remove it using the twist screw, or a hex key if you fastened it a bit too tight. It's designed to work well in tough off-road conditions on 22.2-35mm bars, and on the road saw no problems.

The body is made of a heat-radiating aluminium shell, which is finished really nicely – you know you're holding a quality product, especially given the 244g weight of it. The thing about heat-radiating bodies is that they get hot – in this case so hot that it becomes impossible to hold in bare hands when it's been sitting on the Blitz setting for 20 minutes or so.

The light is designed to power down to the low setting when it gets too hot, but that's not ideal when you're enjoying the considerable benefits of the 1600 lumen Blitz setting. The 1200-lumen high does keep things in check more easily, and to be honest that is bright enough for just about any situation anyway – and you get a 2hr burn time with that (with times generally doubling as brightnesses subsequently halve).

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Another characteristic to note is that the beam is relatively focused – a bit too focused in my opinion, where I'd quite like to see the higher settings make more of the brightness by producing a more 'floodlit' beam. It's by no means bad, giving plenty of illumination and some useful bleed into the periphery (as well as some designed-in side visibility too), but nevertheless it could be a touch more 'general' in its focus.

Despite the niggles, this is a very capable heavy-duty light that doesn't require an external power unit to hit some seriously high outputs. At £139.99 it's not cheap – Giant's Recon HL1600 is £99.99 (review to come), although Cateye's Volt 1700 is another £30 – but with the obvious build quality, from the aluminium shell to the screw bolts that hold it together and the tidy USB recharging port and cover in the rear of the unit, it'll definitely last.

Verdict

Admirable performance, easy to use and great build quality