I don't want to pour cold water on your parade, guys, but the writer of this article is employed by Wilfried Schmidt of Schmidt Maschinenbau, the maker of the SON hub dynamo. Of course his own products come out top of the tests! For the record, no deliberate dishonesty is alleged or needs be involved; proper scientific testing is designed to remove even implicit, unexpressed bias, for instance in the design of the test protocols, and in not using the instruments of any one manufacturer to measure the results of all.
If this farce was played out in the US or the UK there would be an outcry about bias. That it happens in a foreign language doesn't make it any more acceptable. Ask yourself, how loud would you screech if the CTC Magazine hired the Dawes designer to trash Thorn bikes under the spurious claim that it was a "scientific test". (The magazine would take years to recover its credibility; my guess is that the uproar would very likely kill it.)
For the record, I have both SON and Shimano hub dynamos and am pleased with both for different types of riding. Also for the record, I've had some converse with Andreas Oehler and I don't think he's dishonest, but what I personally think is as irrelevant as his results. He works for one of the combatants and is therefore not a fit person to publish comparative tests, period.
One wonders (for about 0.0001 of a second, less than the blink of an eye), which hub dynamos would be at the top of the table if the test were conducted by Shimano engineers...
Sorry fellows, but there are a good number of these zenophobic German expressions of commercial nationalism about and they're promotional material, advertising plain and simple, not independent tests, and shouldn't be treated by us as reliable information on the same level as, say, a test conducted by Chris Juden for CTC or by the reliable and independent Dutch cycling association.
Andre Jute
