Okay, it eventually got dark enough to be worth going for a ride, so instant review time:
Firstly, DarkerSide's video is a reasonable representation of what the beam looks like, though bear in mind the eye sees more outside the bright part of the beam than the camera does.
So, what you've got is a lovely smoothly illuminated nearfield, and then a couple of brighter wedges in a very shallow inverted V with an extremely sharp cutoff above it, to throw more light down the road. I can't over-emphasise how even the nearfield beam is - it wipes the floor with the Cyo Premium's weird artefacts, and is reminiscent of a mountain bike light's flood mode if it only shone below the horizontal. The top part of the beam is a bit like having a pair of partly overlapping 60 Lux Cyos side-by-side, aimed just above the half-a-mountain-bike-light. Hopefully that description makes some sense...
So, I did a short ride taking in an assortment of traffic densities, street lighting and off-road cyclepaths:
The first thing I noticed was how bright all the reflective road signs and number plates were, and how much they were flickering as the bike's suspension did its thing. Pretty much like you get from a car's dipped headlights when you drive over an unsurfaced road (and a reminder to re-adjust my suspension damping after servicing the fork last week). I stopped at a convenient car park with a fence to aim at, and re-aligned the beam downwards slightly, so it wasn't shining above the horizontal when I lay back in the seat. This reduced the flicker from road signs, and seemed to keep the beam off the windows of overtaking cars (the numberplates were still brightly illuminated). Otherwise, like most other bike lights in urban traffic, the effect is mostly lost in streetlighting and car headlights, other than the well-lit nearfield.
On less cluttered but street-lit residential roads, the distance illumination is more apparent, and seems similar to that from a Cyo Premium. I noticed the colour temperature of the LED seems to match that of the streetlights that were recently installed in our area, so it's not obvious where the side edge of the beam is.
But where it really got interesting was on the local Sustrans route (in lieu of a properly dark lane): Unlit, mostly tarmac, varying hazards and appropriate speeds. The beam on this thing is huge, and you've got the even nearfield illumination to make sense of the surface conditions while still having plenty of brightness thrown into the distance for spotting people, dogs, bollards and so on. As a recumbentist, I was pleased to note less foot flash than the Cyo (tbh, it's more a case of foot blanking of the spill at the edge of the beam - you don't really notice the illumination of your feet), and that the extra width meant that tight cornering without the aid of a head torch[1] was practical.
Downsides? Well, there's a noticeable darker strip between the two parts of the beam - not that it isn't lit, but you do notice it as a beam artefact. Also, as the distant part of the beam is such a narrow vertical angle with sharp cut-off, it's very sensitive to vertical alignment. On a suspended bike dealing with BCC's finest tree rooted hand-rolled shared path, the cutoff and dark strip bounce around, drawing your attention to the shape of the beam, rather than what it's illuminating. On proper machine-rolled road, this is much less of a problem, and I expect the effect is much less on a rigid bike.
As there's so much light on the road, you become acutely aware that you're illuminating pedestrians from the waist down. I was amused by the sight of a dog being walked by what momentarily appeared as a pair of disembodied trousers.
In the absence of an assistant, I didn't get to look into the beam with my remaining eye, other than by putting the bike on its stand and observing the standlight. From ~30 metres the lamp pleasingly appears as a white disc. If you crouch down into the beam it becomes the usual point source of glare.
I also couldn't do side-by-side comparisons with the Cyo Premium (and they wouldn't be completely fair anyway, as it's mounted very low on a Brompton), but subjectively there's a *lot* more light. Whether it's worth the price differential is going to come down to how much night riding you do and the speed/conditions. I can see this being a worthwhile upgrade if fast descents are a feature. I don't have a Luxos to compare.
I can't comment on the annoyingness or otherwise of the blue ring - there's a derailleur post in the way. It doesn't appear to be excessively bright.
[1] This is often an issue on cycles where lighting is fixed to the frame rather than the steering axis.
