Raleri fog anti-fog visor is better than Pinlock

For years I have been a fan of Pinlock anti-fog visors for motorcycle helmets. I couldn't imagine owning a helmet without one. But now I have found an even better alternative to keep my helmet 100% fog free, even in the winter with all ventilation closed to keep warm.

In the summer I bought a Caberg helmet for it's ultra-visibility. What I didn't know was that due to the double-curved visor a Pinlock would not fit. Bummer. Now that temperatures in Belgium are falling and rainy days are  more frequent, I had to find a solution.

I found the Italian company Raleri, who are famous for their photocromic visors. They even have an LCD visor that can become very dark or light in an instant. Cool stuff, but not what I needed, since my helmet already had built-in Sunglasses (BTW, I still prefer Sunax over built-in sunglasses). Luckily on their page, I also found a standard transparent visor inset.

The advantages of this Raleri visor inset over Pinlock are:

• permanent fix with good seal
• optically much better
• less stray light from car headlights at night
• (supposedly) more scratch resistant.

However much I like the Pinlock inserts, my biggest problem with them was that they scratch so easily. Most of the time this happen when you accidentily break the seal between visor and insert, causing some water to get caught between the 2 surfaces. You then have to remove and clean the insert. Even the lightest touch of the softests cloth will cause scratches.

A second problem with the Pinlock is the optical distortion you get. During the day this results in a very slight halo around the edges of objects, at night this becomes a radial pattern of stray light starting at each point source of light. Not unusable, but certainly not desirable.

The Raleri insert does not have these problems. Since the insert is (non permanently) glued to the visor, there is no possibility of water seeping between the two screens. But the most important is it's much better optical quality. You barely notice it's there. Certainly at night this makes a big difference. You still get some radial light beaming, but 80% less then with a Pinlock (both compared new, without scratches. Scratches make things worse).

There is 1 thing I would advise Raleri to change. The edge of their insert is, in contrast with Pinlock, completely transparent. This seems nice at first and I think it might help with your peripheral vision. But the disadvantage is that given the different thickness this edge seam acts like a prism. The effect is that when you look through the 4mm at the edge, you see an image that is shifted with respect to the rest of the screen. This might confuse your brain when you need to act on reflexes. This also causes a small reflection of the light on the screen in certain positions with respect to the sun. Not a big problem, but it could be avoided by making the glue not 100% transparent (like the edge of a Pinlock). I bet someone at Raleri is cursing at me now, since they probably worked hard to achieve this completely transparent edge :)
The picture below illustrates this.

Installation was dead easy. For my Caberg helmet I lined up the top of the visor with the bottom of the sunglasses in the 'up' position. I made sure the edge seam was high enough so my clear vision starts right under the edge of the sunglasses, which is perfect.

The templates on the Raleri website helped me choose the right size, which was size 'small' for my Caberg helmet, due to the strange shape of the visor on this helmet.

The best part is that the price of €18,76 on their website is an incredible deal!