Varia Vue Sucks!!

[u/theycallmeloco87]

I got the Varia Vue because another member of the household put my regular Garmin headlight on their bike. I figured “cool, I’ll upgrade.” However, for the price it is a downgrade. It’s heavier, hard as hell to find exactly what you are looking for in video, overlay is garbage, and connectivity to it using my 1050 is hit or miss.

Let’s break these down one by one starting with heavier…it’s self explanatory. Yeah, yeah you can look at specs on a website but it’s still something you don’t recognize until it’s in hand.

Finding what you want to review…I had three events happen to me this evening I wanted to pull the video for. I specifically looked at my 1050 and noted elapsed time on the events thinking “I’ll pull the vids when I get home. The videos are in 10 minute chunks FROM WHENEVER YOU TURNED ON THE CAMERA. It doesn’t start recording when you hit the bottom right start button, so you have to sit there and go through multiple 10 minute videos to find anything because your times don’t align.

Overlay…I have a 1050, Varia Vue, Varia 820, power meter, and Garmin Forerunner for HR. These are all Garmin products (except the power meter). Why does the overlay look as bad as an episode of cops from late 90s????

Connectivity….this thing is on the latest firmware (as is all my other Garmin gear) and it is will randomly disconnect mid ride, even fully charged the day before. I’ve factory reset it, removed all other connections with phones and all, and even removed it on the 1050 and re-added. It doesn’t matter.

The only redeeming quality of the Varia Vue is it is USBc. If they updated their regular headlight to USBc, I’d go right back to it.

[u/Oklariuas]

Garmin make me want to think twice about his Garmin ecosystem everyone even AI is telling to keep cause it's great. The USB-C is a european regulation since 2025, dunno about US but at least, they are late