Confused: LED Headlight Conversion

Actually I take back my previous statement about those looking like Philips. While those look similar in design, the high beam LEDs are oriented wrong. They should mimic the filament placement in a halogen, and those high beam LEDs are stacked vertically instead of horizontally like the low beam.

As to the 'filters' to place over the LED to change the color, also another recent gimmick. Running without a 'filter' will produced greatest light output.

 

Reguardless of filter they are easily 3 times brighter than stock.

 

More correctly, they claim to be 3 times brighter than stock. Most of the claimed output on Chinese LEDs seems to escape from the packaging during shipment though. Some of what remains goes directly into oncoming driver's eyes. What's left sometimes makes it to the road surface.

 

Well I guess u have had a completely different experience than U have. What kind were u using? My experience using these bulbs has been great and I am yet to find a better warrenty than the 10 years offered on these. I personally find these bulbs to be 3 times brighter and never get high beamed by oncoming traffic. Exactly what I was looking for.

 

Don't take this personally.

Objectively these lights violate 3 of my requirements.

1) They are 'adjustable'. No reputable manufacture makes 'adjustable' lights. Lighting optics are precision engineered to the fraction of a mm, not 'freehanded' by 'eyeballing' it.

2) The high beam orientation is wrong. The LEDs should be in a horizontal line, instead they are vertically stacked, meaning high beam performance and pattern will suffer.

3) The color temp is too high. An assumption, but with filters for 3000k, 6500k and 8000k I'm guessing the unfiltered color is 6500k and there is a filter for lower and one for higher. 6500k is pretty high in temp to be useful. That color is highly cosmetic and very far from the what color human eyes see best at night.

While you may claim they seem 3x brighter, have you measured it with a lux meter? I've measured a few and they usually fall short of advertised claims. Most people think they are brighter because the light is whiter/bluer, but that is not the same as lumen output. Not saying the lights are not brighter, but it is common for Chinese manufacturers to exaggerate their claims.

 

So let me come clean on this post and automotive lighting in general. I've been somewhat of a "lighting geek" since the late 1970's. I actually had one of the first sets of Cibie "Z Beam" replacement headlights in my 1976 Toyota Corolla SR-5 Liftback when they came out. (Google them and see how far ahead of their time they were.) When everybody else was running "sealed beams," I had 55/100 watt capsule style bulbs available only in Europe at the time. The car also featured a set of Cibie Oscar Pencil Bean Driving Lights with unheard of (back then) 100 watt halogen bulbs. The lighting on that car was so far ahead of anything anybody else was running that lots of folks started coming to me for lighting advice and installation work.

Fast forward a few years. I was running the equivalent of Crashnburn80's "ultimate headlight upgrade" in my 1997 Ford F-150, followed by my 1999 and 2002 F-150's - along with some killer Hella driving lights hidden behind the grills. That's right, the HD harness, 65/100 watt bulbs and all.

Next, when everybody was getting all fluffy about HID upgrades, I was stupid enough to try several sets and come to the same conclusion crashnburn80 did - they were junk and would never work with standard halogen headlight housings. I have watched and read his very informative posts on all kinds of "latest & greatest" lighting upgrades and agree 100% with his testing methods and conclusions. (The fact that they mirror my experimentation with upgrades my friends come to me with just adds more credibility to his posts.)

And finally, we get to LED replacement bulbs. I can't tell you how many people come to me and ask what kind of LED bulbs they should install in their vehicles to "improve" their lighting. So far, absolutely nothing I've seen actually improves the amount of usable light on the ground. The biggest issue that needs to be overcome is the shape of the light source. With incandescent bulbs, one literally has an orb of light. With LEDs, you have a diode with a surface that glows. So LEDs - by their very nature - are much more directional. Trying to get that directional light to mimic the "orb" in a standard bulb is a trick nobody has mastered yet. Until somebody does that, retrofitting LED bulbs into housings designed for standard bulbs is a waste of time in my opinion.

So I can't absolutely guarantee that the particular bulbs you purchased don't actually put out "3 times the light output of standard bulbs." I'll go way out on a limb and pretty much guarantee that they don't though based on way too much previous experience with all sorts of junk Chinese lighting products. And just so you know, many of the "different" brands are actually the exact same product - just packaged differently - to fool more people. (And yes, I have been to China many times for the company I recently retired from, so I know what games contract manufacturers play over there.)

I hope that answers your question.