Testing circumstances
The DO Blade Raceday was tested on multiple rides in the Netherlands, temperatures between 15 and 25 degrees, and in a number of longer trails in Spain, Pyrenees and mountains in the Alicante provinvce. The rides in Spain were invariably between 2 and 3 hours, riding at temperatures between 30-35 degrees celsius.
The Review
Fit
During the testing period I wore the DO Blade together with the POC Trabec helmet. The two fit really well together, the glasses (or goggles as I seem to keep calling them in the video review :-\ ) lined up to the edge of the helmet, and the frame fit well between the helmet and my ears. This resulted in a really confortable fit. There is no wind drag through gaps in the fit (as you can have with some glasses), so that was good as well.
The field of view is very wide, the glasses really wrap around all the way to the side of your head, up above the eyebrows, and down over the top of the cheek bones.
The DO Blade Raceday is very light. As a result it sat very comfortably on my knows, no pinching near the nose bridge, and nevertheless keeping firmly in place even in the roughest and most jumpy patches of the trail. Because they fit so well and grip your head tightly, they can feel pinchy after a while.
It takes about 1,5 hours of riding to start feeling a pinch emerging above my left ear. Not enough to distract me during important action packed moments, but enough to annoy me during boring moments…such as climbs, I can get really bored on climbs… and things start to annoy me quite quickly 😉
Lens
The DO Blade Raceday allows for a change of the one piece lens. You can pop out the lens quite easily and change it to another type of lense to fit to the lighting circumstances. The lenses that I used was the Violet lens VLT 28.4% a “Polycarbonate lens for road environment and all round conditions. The violet tint gives better contrast of the irregularities of the road surface. The Ripel treatment helps keeping fog, dirt and grime off your lenses and makes water pearl off.” (source: POC website)
I sweated so profusely in the Spanish heat, that I can’t attest to all the water of my sweat pearling off, but I can say that even out on the trail with a glaring sun, the violet lenses did quite well. Perhaps a mirror lens would have worked even better, (unfortunately I cannot compare both experiences) being tuned to sunny conditions, but at no point during my rides did I feel blinded in anyway. Conversely, in lower light circumstances such as dusk rides and forest, the lenses gave a lot of visibility.
During my rides I didn’t experience any fog forming, though driving with it in an air-conditioned car I did have some of that which we had to rub off.
Looks
As I confessed to in the Trabec review, I do generally like POC design, and this extends to the DO Blade Raceday. Especially when used with the Trabec helmet I think it looks good. I don’t generally wear it on a daily basis in my free time, but that’s not what they-re for anyway. I can imagine that some people would be bothered by the rather prominent POC logo on the bridge of the nose, but it didn’t bother me much and it didn’t impair the view.
So in conclusion, light weight, well fitting, good looking with a versatile lens. Great stuff. It doesn’t come cheap though. The glasses retail at € 230,-
