The ultimate headlight upgrade H4 (not LED or HID)

I don’t know your experience with leds. Maybe you don’t like progression. But this whole halogen burning hotter and brighter just seems asinine. Why not choose an equality bright light, that lasts 10x longer and won’t melt your headlights (joking).
Check out my OPT7 page that exploded a couple years ago. They make a great product imo and have lasted years. Check page 2 for light output pics. Plus they’re on sale for $64 a pair now til Christmas.
https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/just-installed-opt7-leds-in-projectors-and-fogs.413429/

They now make a set that are 20% brighter. The Flux Beam X. Imo. Scorching your halogens to death vs clear, cool, perfect white light? It’s an easy choice for me.

 

I’ve actually tried many LEDs, probably more than most.

You are not understanding lighting optics and missing the point. If a lighting optic is designed for halogen, it is going to perform best with a halogen. Tiny geometry changes have massive impact in lighting optics. Did you see the post I linked? A ~1300 lumen halogen completely smoked a 1750 lumen LED, a much nicer LED than Opt7. Why? Because there is far more to headlight optics than brightness of the light source, which is what you are not understanding. The LED needs to be as small as a halogen filament and emit light in all directions to work correctly in a halogen assembly. But LEDs are massively bulky by comparison and only emit light to the sides, which is why they perform so poorly. This causes complete lack of hot spot and lack of focus which means they have no distance projection and shift the light pattern to have massive foreground light and loss of distance light. Unfortunately lots of people see huge increases in foreground light as an initial improvement before they realize they no longer have distance projection.

This has nothing to do with not liking progression, it has everything to do with understanding the engineering of the lighting assembly optics and how to best improve performance given the constraints of the system. Putting the wrong light source in the assembly demonstrates a lack of understanding. As mentioned before, if you want to run LEDs the correct way to do so is to use an assembly built from the ground up for LEDs to have the correct optics. The only one is the TRS/Morimoto LED headlight assembly for $1200+.

While a high efficiency bulb can easily outperform an LED, a high efficiency high wattage bulb that this thread was based on will completely annihilate an LED in a performance comparison. The fact that bulb life is shorter is just a reality of the technology. It is a spectrum, of life vs performance. You can choose where to land in the spectrum, I favor maximum performance.

 

Are you going to tell me the technology behind all new car manufacturers and their projector/led setups are less advanced, visually, than decades old halogen technology?
What about the new tundra and sequoia led setups? They’re different in a way I’m not familiar with. They don’t use projectors. Are those setups any good?

 

Please explain this lighting concept to me. They use leds but without projectors. Pros and cons? Are they any good? Are these along the lines of those new morimoto led designs?

 

Those have lighting systems designed specifically for LEDs. Putting an LED bulb in a halogen housing design scatters the light. Why? Angle of refraction, beam concentration, etc. simple physics. Scattering the light will blind oncoming drivers and there's nothing worse than some asshat with bright, poorly aimed, blinding lights.

 

You do not need projectors for LED lights properly designed from the ground up for LEDs. The only reason Projectors are important is when you stuff improper hack LED products into a halogen housing and fubar the optics so bad that you rely on the projector cut off to try and clean Up the mess you created.

Take a look at KCs LED products specifically the G4, they produce world class results with proper cut offs using reflector technology with LED light sources, because they build their reflector based products from the ground up for the LED light source.

You can see my thread on those here:
https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/the-led-sae-j583-fog-pod-fog-light-review.554813/

 

Funny, one of mine burned out Friday evening as I was heading home from work. Halfway through it that crazy storm hit and I said fuck it, and fuck that metal clip, and just drove without one. Replaced both, and it is incredible the noticeable difference with 2 new bulbs. I'm still running the Hella 130/90, lasted about a year, I'm good with that

 

Ha yes, the storm that just kept on giving last friday. Many trees down and power outages galore on the eastside. Good made it home with the Rudolph headlight!

 

I was one of those many on the eastside with no power. Gave me a chance to test out my battery backup garage door openers which was kinda cool.

What’s even worse than knocking the clip off, is clipping the bulb in when it isn’t seated properly, then having it be virtually impossible to unclip the bulb to reseat it. I was beginning to think I was going to have to remove the headlight assembly.

 

My entire neighborhood was black and without power, turned down my street and everything was lit up like normal, hallelujah. Only street around us untouched. That was crazy.

Pretty sure I had my clip in backwards last time, not 100% sure, but 68% sure

 

Battery backup, sweet, Might have to mod that into my garage...

 

Not to drift too far off topic but they are pretty slick. I bought them more for the smart features to program automatic close if left open at nights and set configurable alerts as well as be be controllable for my phone. The features have come in exceptionally handy.

 

Would like to crack a beer on the above topic for a sidebar. Baaack on topic, I am seeing what the dealer might be willing to get me for goodwill replacement stock housing's for my 09 as they are both old part numbers and the drivers DRL is melted. I will be ordering the wiring harness upgrade and upgrading to the Osrams.

 

Shoot me a PM if you’d like more info on door openers.

Haven’t heard any dealers comping the TSB lights in quite a while. Links to the best prices I have found are listed in the original post in the thread.

 

Those are the part numbers I am using, thank you for keeping the thread current. I am expecting a "no" from them, but will then see what dealer pricing comes in at as that is what I was offered on the driver side.

 

Since I always seem to be driving across the pass at night in the snow, I decided for the next time I will try using the Osram 85/80w All Season bulbs. These are a yellower version of the high efficiency 85/80w Hypers specifically for poor weather use. While Amazon in the US does not sell them, Amazon.co.uk does, and for a much better price than anywhere else I've seen even with the most rapid 6 day international shipping option.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/OSRAM-6420...000&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=osram+h4+all+season

While looking on UK Amazon, I also found these... the Europeans are really over the top with their soccer...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Osram-H4-H...UTF8&qid=1545338951&sr=8-54&keywords=osram+h4

 

Ohh... ive always liked the yellow haze

 

Kinda partial to purple myself.

 

Osram Super Brights or everything at https://www.powerbulbs.com/us/ are 25% off right now

 

This upgrade is unreal. I had piaa LEDs in before and this smokes them out of the water. Down dark roads at night it's like turning on the sun