Cateye Viz 450 Rear Light

As the name suggests, Cateye's Viz 450 rear light can throw out an extremely bright beam, although the full power is reserved for an intermittent flash in the 'Daytime Hyperflash' mode. In some specific use-cases you might appreciate this amount of power, but for most cyclists it is overkill and potentially a little provocative. There are more socially acceptable modes, but you could also just buy a less powerful, cheaper light.

I've tested a whole load of Cateye lights over the years and I really rate the brand – its lights aren't the cheapest (but certainly not the most expensive either) and they tend to be well-made units that chuck out lots of light and last for years.

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Cateye's previous Rapid range of rear lights offered excellent all-round visibility using a line of LEDs that were visible from the sides and the rear. I still have some that I tested six years ago and they still work fine, which is a decent innings – other brands' lights have not lasted nearly as well.

They were less effective in terms of range than some lights that used lenses to focus a beam back down the road. Whether that matters depends on your environment – in an urban area I'd choose good all-round visibility over being seen by someone half a mile away.

With the Viz range, Cateye combines the all-round visibility from its earlier Rapid models with a focused beam that will have you seen from hundreds of metres back. We've already tested the cheaper 100 and 300-lumen models, with the 150 to come, and this, the Viz 450, is the Big Daddy of the range, designed to ensure your safety on the most unfriendly of A-roads and/or to aggravate the most taxi drivers possible.

Mount

In terms of design, use and lighting modes, the Viz 450 shares almost everything with its less powerful brethren. Steve thought the new Snap System did a good job of holding the Viz 300 on the bike but had parts that could get lost if you take it off in an unlit shed. Having used this Viz 450 for a few weeks and having, admittedly, the luxury of a well-lit garage, I don't really think it's an issue.

There are four pieces – the light unit itself, which has a square attachment point on the rear, a rigid nylon bracket with a slot into which the light can slide in four directions, allowing you to mount it vertically or horizontally. I know, right? The correct answer is of course vertically because Aero. A rubbery block then pushes onto the back of the nylon bracket and locks the light into position in that bracket. This block is the piece that is pushed up against your seatpost and can accommodate round and aero posts (provided they're not overly deep) and does a reasonable job with D-shaped comfort seatposts too.

The final piece is the stretchy rubber ladder strap, which I think is a nicer option than the basic o-ring used a lot on rear lights, although Shaun thought the opposite when testing the Viz 100! This is retained on the nylon block via a tongue on one side of that block that means it doesn't just fall off when you remove the light; I found this works fine.

Cateye offers a range of optional mounts too, including a clip that you could use on a trouser pocket or bag (for the princely sum of £2), and an adaptor using its venerable FlexTight design.

Modes

The last rear light I tested had nine modes, so the four available here are modest by comparison but are likely sufficient for almost everyone. It's the usual 'long press for on and off, short press to cycle through modes' and it switches on in the mode you were in when you switched it off. When the battery gets low, it switches to the least thirsty mode to give you the best chance of getting home.

There are five LEDs, of which three sit behind Cateye's OptiCube lenses, and two are unfocused. The Constant mode is the thirstiest, running for 5 hours and 20 minutes and using just the three focused LEDs to generate a claimed 40 lumens. Such is the effectiveness of the lenses that this 40 lumens feels like more than enough and is very difficult to look at directly from close up. The Flashing mode is about 3Hz, alternating between the OptiCube LEDs and the other two. It'll run for a claimed 65 hours and also outputs 40 lumens.

The Group Ride mode unexpectedly ups the power to 130 lumens, but in a pulsing rather than flashing pattern apparently intended not to be too irritating to your riding mates. It uses all five of the LEDs, with one, two or three of the OptiCube LEDs being on at any given point. Having sat behind a friend using this light as part of the testing, I'd agree that the lack of strobe effect is definitely a blessing, but it still feels like overkill – in my view, a single one of the bright LEDs would be ample and I'd prefer it to be on constantly, which should deliver 15 hours' run–time.

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You only get the full beans in the Daytime Hyperflash mode, and only for the briefest of flashes. This mode name has been around for a while but what it does here is different to Cateye's older lights. It used to mean 'always on, with brighter flashes' and I thought it was a great choice for daytime running or well-lit busy night-time environments. Here it goes Full Rave with all five LEDs flashing at different speeds and the full 450 lumens deployed a little over once per second.

Steve described this mode on the Viz 300 as luridly chaotic and it is – it's not just the bonkers output of those bright flashes but all the various rapid strobing that's going on at the same time, which makes this hard to ignore. Following behind this light in the daytime, I found that from around 100 metres it was very effective at being impossible to miss (and not overly bothersome) but from 10 metres it was pretty irritating. I didn't ride with this mode at night, so cannot report the thoughts of other road users. I would only use this mode if I was doing a lot of riding on fast A-roads in the daytime, and it would make me feel safer in that specific environment.

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The most startling thing about this light is how bright a mere 40 lumens can be when funnelled through effective lenses. The constant mode is very bright when seen from 300 metres away at night, and vastly more so than the higher lumen output from the lens-less Knog Blinder Skull. On this basis, unless your commute takes in a lot of fast daytime dual carriageways (my sympathy), I just don't think a case can be made for needing more than 10 times this output, as here.

Happily, there are less bright, less expensive options from the same range, and for my money the Viz 100 at half the price would be all the light I'd need.

Verdict

It's very good but overkill for most – just because you can have a 450-lumen rear light doesn't mean you should