Shimano’s New R9200P/8100P Power Meters: Technical Differences

While much of the attention of this week’s new Dura-Ace R9200 & Ultegra R8100 Di2 product launches have been focused on the wireless and 12-speed access, far less has been written on the 2nd generation power meter. Likely because unlike the rest of the group set, the power meter isn’t available yet. Still, it remained the part of the Shimano next-gen group set story I was most interested in, given the accuracy challenges the first generation Shimano Dura-Ace power meter had (the R9100P). Even more, if Shimano could rectify those issues while concurrently expanding it to Ultegra (as they are doing now with the R8100P), then that could make for a very compelling integrated power meter option on bikes. Thus, I spent a chunk of the morning talking power meter tech with Shimano and their power meter team. In doing so we walked through their explanation of why the 1st generation units had the accuracy issues they did, what they’ve done to fix it in the 2nd generation, and then a slew of other technology features