tttiltheend wrote:
cyclenutnz wrote:
...only advantage is that it matches the rest of the groupset.
Well, at well under half the price you can have Favero Assioma pedals and still use the crank of your choice. So then the only use case is if you are, say, a Speedplay die hard and also a Dura Ace die hard. A pretty small use case. But it sure is pretty.
On the other hand, for all the hue and cry about how inaccurate this PM is, one-sided power meters have potentially much greater accuracy issues and there doesn't seem to be much of a hue and cry about those. We have a Stages that came with a second hand bike we bought, it read 10-20% off for both my wife and myself, the battery is now removed and it's relegated to use as a dumb crank on a trainer bike.
i don't think these are all the parameters that frame this discussion. as for me, i'm a speedplay guy, a confirmed speedplay guy, on the road, and i'm not really interested in changing from speedplay until other pedal makers recognize and adopt speedplay's features. if you look at our overview of pedals among the top finishers in kona, it's also obvious that speedplay shines brightest among those who know and appreciate the features in a pedal. the features in this pedal makes this an untrivial component to the discussion.
as for shimano's cranks, this is the dominant crank in the marketplace. not just shimano, but stages, the questionable-futured pioneer, giant, and others place their PMs in this crank and in some cases only in this crank. so, one area i'm investigating is the paradox of PMing this crank: it's the world's premier crank platform, but it also, apparently, is uniquely ill-suited to hosting a PM. until someone figures this crank out. i write this not because of what i've discovered, but just based on what i'm reading from others who've put a lot more work into this than i have.
beyond this, i think you're right, a pedal-based PM sidesteps the difficulty in getting a PM to work on a shimano crank, and a pedal-based PM is modular. but as i wrote in the review - and i'd be shocked if even half the people commenting to this review even read it - the larger question going forward is whether PMs will eventually just be ubiquitous on bikes sold above a certain price, with that price creeping down, down, down. you have both bike brands (specialized and giant) near the ability to offer their own PMs OE, and you have component makers (SRAM, Shimano, FSA) working on it. if you get an FSA PM stocked OE on a $3,500 tri bike, or a Quarq on a SRAM Force AXS 1x gravel bike selling for under $4,000, that's going to apply pressure to the market.
Dan Empfield
aka Slowman