Campagnolo launches its own power meter with a £2k price tag – we’ve got one and here’s our first impressions

I don't care for power meters at all (wouldn't want one even if it was offered for free, I like to keep my bikes simple), but for purely academic purposes:

A 1,5% accuracy when riding at 300W would mean the readout could be anywhere between 295,5 and 304,5W.
A 1% accuracy when riding at 300W would mean the readout could be anywhere between 297 and 303W.

So that's a 9W vs a 6W bandwidth at 300W.
I never work with wattages, so if any of that matters is up for others to decide.
Personally I don't train for anything, I just go on rides, and as long as I've had fun a ride  and it helps me stay healthy, I'm golden.

So at very worst, if Meter A is 100% accurate, Meter B could be 3W out, or they could both be completely accurate or the same amount wrong...

Agree with your last sentence, I used to have a power meter, I found it didn't tell me anything I didn't know; after four decades of riding, I know when I'm on the limit or when I have anything in reserve. If it was good enough for Pogacar on the Planche des Belles Filles, good enough for me.

the way I read the article Campag are claiming it to be less accurate than thier competitors since they are claiming +/- 1% (a range of 2%) while the others are claiming 1.5% accuracy.

There is always a risk that this is just poor composition of the article and I am not going looking for the various manufacturer specs

± 1% is better accuracy than ± 1.5%.  If you want to talk about "range", then the others would be 3% [+1.5% -(-1.5%) = 3%]

Has anyone bought them?

I assume you have considered the fact that campy have been on a slow decline vs shimano/SRAM for years at this point and that part of the reason their revenue/profits are so much less than the other two massive players is because they are simply not competitive and haven't been for years at this point. Its not like Campy are some small boutique start up that didn't, at one point have a considerable share of the market and have simply dropped the ball for years...

As to them not meeting someone elses arbitrary financial goals, I think that if they don't start to become more relevant again they will start to fail to meet their own financial targets in the coming years. 

I agree that their PM isn't really of any relevance to any of this but to suggest that Campy aren't in a pretty poor position is somewhat silly. 

Campagnolo still makes profit every year by selling as much product as they can make in house, without spending huge sums on sponsorship or making millions of cheap units in Malaysia or China to fuel the OEM market with low margins. Campagnolo's strategy of targeting the very high end probably makes them better placed to weather the incoming storm that the industry is due to face, where the low/middle end bike sales that shimano/sram make their money from will be hardest hit 

What makes you think they're in "slow decline"?  Is your metric just that their market share is smaller?  "Slow decline" has to be measured at least against a company's goals, and as far as I can tell, none of us know what Campy's goals are. So saying they're in decline is guessing at best.

By your argument, Colnago is in decline since its market share is smaller than it once was, but Colnago has stated its "goal" is to cater exclusively to that market. Colnago has said they are meeting their financial goals.  That success as viewed by Colnago lays waste to the idea that a smaller market share implicitly means a company is "declining".

Euhm. P2max makes very accurate and consistent powermeters since early 2010. Accuracy is not the same as consistency. I had type s, ngeco, 2x ng now. And they are keep running consistent day in day out (not affected in real world conditions). A lot of pwm work indoor work nice but as soon as outside they get inconsistencies, overreading, .... It takes companies like Garmin, SRM 4iii many iterations to get a meter tconsistent for prices which are laughable. My type s is now 10y old and still runs like a charm. A p2max ngeco costs around 500 euro.

SRM didnt even have temp comp a few years back for eye watering prices (3k+ crank included). I use a rotor carbon crank with p2max ng 4sl) and rotor rings for 1500 euro the same as what I would need to pay for shimano junk. And its way lighter.

2.3k for this combo is laugable for such company and they still thing that they can still sell this overpriced stuff.
 

Look at Assioma. Cheaper option and are very consistent and accurate for a normal price. That company is way smaller then Campa.

The power meter development has nothing to do with size, and yet we have no data yet on the precision (aka, "consistency") or accuracy of Campy's PM.  Yes, Assioma's are excellent. That's one reason I chose Assiomas!  The larger point is that SRM is not the be-all/end-all of PMs. They were the first, and they've got that legacy, but being first and having a legacy do not imply anything about the quality of a product.

Note that Favero is a small company focused on one thing. Campy is also small company, but their focus is significantly wider.

And Shimano can't make an accurate meter. SRAM bought their PM tech and personnel when they bought Quarq.  

For the record, all SRM did was apply what was already in use elsewhere. SRAM didn't come with some new tech or physics.  Wheatstone bridges and other strain gauges have been around for a very long time. Just ask anyone who's taken a first-year electrical engineering course.

You might also want to review the differences between Campy's PM and SRM's.

The only people who care about ultra accurate pm numbers are pros. And they ride what they are told and are pretty happy enough on that score. The bigger point is, Campag are seriously in decline. Wake up if you really want to dismiss this. They used to make a decent top quality group set for every level. Super record, Potenza, Athena, Centaur, Chorus. Now you only get SR & Chorus. They totally abandoned the middle market. The bit where 105 and Rival sit - where probably most of the money comes from. They think they can live off their name, but it's totally invisible nowadays. Unless it's a top end Colnago with it fitted it's hardly ever seen. Their legacy is vanishing and not many people really care about what brand of gears they have, so long as they are functional. Their wheels are all they really have left and they are not the best on the market for the premium either. 

That's false.  I doubt the pros even know.  The pros don't do any high-resolution testing of the power meters.  High-resolution testing is done in labs, not on the road, and it's done with calibrated sensors and other calibrated electronic devices.  And how do account for all the pros running Shimano power meters, power meters that have shown to be wildly imprecise and inaccurate, eh?

You make a lot of assumptions without any facts in hand.

Point is, if pros are not getting the best meters out there on their bikes - most are Shimano or Sram (QuarQ) or power2max etc. then who is benefitting? 
 

Abd let's look at your argument. No facts to back it up whatsoever yet say I'm false. 

They are pros. They get paid to use what they are paid to use. Unless what they are paid to use is so bad that affects their performance, then they benefit, and so do the people who are paying them.

Very funny, but you stray from satire, which is fine, into misinformation, which is not.

Did you fit the Ultra Torque yourself? It might be fantastic once it is all assembled, but I think it is a bit of a nightmare to work on compared with traditional BBs and chainsets.

Ultra-Torque is just a single bolt to install/remove, it couldn't be easier. Maybe you're thinking of Power-Torque - this was a bit trickier but still easily done with the correct tools.
 

I don't think Campagnolo is any harder to work on than SRAM or Shimano, but they don't exactly encourage home mechanics - dig around for the technical manuals and video tutorials though and you'll find it's straightforward enough. 

It was definitely Ultra-Torque. It's a while since I did it, and I can't remember exactly what the problem was, but at the time I thought it was far more fiddly than traditional gear. I think there was nasty spring clip that was pretty tricky to remove and fit (I suspect a lot of people didn't bother fitting it, as it looked superfluous). And undoing/tightening the bearing cups was a bit of a nightmare, as you had to apply a pretty massive torque and the spanner always felt as though it might slip.

It is hard to fathom someone finding the Ultra Torque cups hard to install or the spring clip 'nasty'. But each to their own. I guess the problem is that most mechanics rarely service a Campagnolo equipped bike and either do not care to look things up or resent the trouble of having to do so.

john_smith wrote:

It was definitely Ultra-Torque. It's a while since I did it, and I can't remember exactly what the problem was, but at the time I thought it was far more fiddly than traditional gear. I think there was nasty spring clip that was pretty tricky to remove and fit (I suspect a lot of people didn't bother fitting it, as it looked superfluous). And undoing/tightening the bearing cups was a bit of a nightmare, as you had to apply a pretty massive torque and the spanner always felt as though it might slip.

I removed UT cranks and cups last weekend without any drama. Marginally fiddlier than Shimano but nothing to write home about. Fitting was easy too.

PS wanna buy a UT chainset?