Brighter whiter halogens. 2017 off road.

Looking to upgrade the halogen bulbs in my 17 off road. LEDs are not satisfactory in the housing. So just give halogens bulbs. And go.......

 

I use Philips X-tremeVision H11's. They work very well. Substantially brighter than the long life bulbs that come from the factory. I also tried a modified H9 Philips which is 65 watts but it was absolutely identical to the X-tremevision H11. Not only visually identical but measured to within a tenth of an f/stop with a Minolta Flashmeter 6.

Philips H11 X-tremeVision Upgrade Headlight Bulb (Pack of 2)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BQWQN1Q/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

So what are you running for your high beams. Still have the h9s? Are they on Amazon to?

 

The standard H9's are fine. There are no improved versions of halogen H9's. At least they're dirt cheap. And honestly, we drove back from Idyllwild at midnight a couple of weeks ago on a mountain highway. The low beams were fabulous and the highs were way more than adequate. All more than you'd need for almost any legal speed limit in the U.S., except those 80 mph stretches in Utah and maybe a few other places.

 

I’m running the PIAA Xtremes. I ran some old HID’s that looked better but they weren’t reliable so I’ll run the PIAA’s until something better comes up.

 

Unfortunately PIAA are some of the worst bulbs you can buy. The blue coating DOES change the color temperature but at the expense of lumens. You're basically putting an 80A (blue) filter over the bulb and you might like the color better but they are not nearly as bright as the Philips or the GE.

 

You can use the H11 as a high beam in our trucks as well right?

 

Philips Automotive Lighting H11 X-tremeVision Upgrade Headlight Bulb with up to 100% More Vision, White (12362XVB2) 2 Count

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00U1OIESK/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Same bulb, different packaging, better price.

https://www.google.com/search?q=phi...e..69i57j0.17487j1j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

 

I did the 35w retrofitsource HID kit in my 2016 TRD Sport.

I did a brighter/better halogen swap before LED, and then ultimately went with HIDs. I am incredibly happy with how much light I have and still have a good cutoff.

 

You'd have to modify the H11 to fit. But that would be working backwards. H9 bulbs run hotter than H11.

 

Search? https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/best-h11-halogen-replacement-bulbs.565120/#post-18562588

 

Do y'all get flashed by other drivers using these bulbs?

 

There's no need to use an H11 in your high beam. The Philips H9's have almost exactly the same output as the X-treme H11 but only cost about seven bucks a piece. And everyone should take their trucks on a dark desert highway (nod to the Eagles) where there is little or no ambient light, let your eyes adjust to the lack of light and see just how good your stock lights really are. Many of the illegal bulb options (and they are illegal) throw too much light on the foreground, overlighting that and reducing how far you can actually see at night. And not getting flashed by oncoming drivers is no indication of the safety or effectiveness of your lights. Lastly, people should definitely be aware that night vision drastically reduces as you age.

 

You run these? Really trying to get as white as possible to kind of match the DRLs

 

Yes. I bought and installed a pair at the time of the thread that I linked. I can't say if they're as white as the DRL's, but they seem considerably whiter than the stock bulbs. If the weather allows, I'll see if I can get a halfway decent picture when it gets dark.

 

The Phillips bulbs are very good. Much brighter than the stock long-life bulbs, but the color temp might only be a hundred Kelvin or so higher, so they'll never ever come close to matching you DRL's, which should be around 6000K, although I never bothered to measure them. But really, why is anyone concerned with matching a daytime running light. It simply doesn't matter from the driver's perspective. I mean, does it matter if someone looking at your truck say to themselves "oh my, their drl's don't match their headlamps." I mean, do people really care and why would any of us.

Halogen bulbs will always be in the 3000-3500 Kelvin range, no matter what. That's just what they are. The ONLY way to get a halogen to have a higher Kelvin rating is to filter out the yellow with a blue coating and that drastically lowers the lumen output, exactly what you never want to do. Another reason that human eyes love halogen is that they have a very smooth spectral output throughout the spectral range. They do have a natural falloff in blue but there are no huge gaps completely missing like in virtually all LEDs I've measured. Our eyes are comparative when it comes to color. There is no such thing as a musician's perfect pitch with regards to color, but there is an automatic white point adaptation where after a short time our brain assumes that the white we're looking at really is white - until you compare it to something else. That's why driving in the city you notice all different color of headlights but on a long drive alone on a country highway, whatever your actual headlight color temperature is, it will appear white to you your eyes. Remember back in the mid 1970's when we were starting to put the Cibié, Bosch and Hella lamps in our cars and those lights seemed so much bluer than the tungsten filament bulbs of the day. It's all a matter of perspective.

 

It's been cool and drizzly here all day. Not dark yet, but I was concerned that trying to take a picture of the illuminated headlights in darkness would just cause everything to wash out. So I went ahead and took these two pics now. In "real life" comparing the whiteness of the stock fog lamps to the Philips XtremeVision low beams, the Philips appear whiter. Recognizing the fact that the DRL's operate in a dimmed mode when the headlights are on, I can say that when I am driving toward a reflective surface (like glass) I don't notice much difference in color between the low beams and the DRL's.

 

Very helpful. Thanks

 

Are your photos shot on manual exposure with raw images and the raw files processed with identical settings or are you shooting auto exposed, auto white balanced jpegs. Unfortunately, these pictures, like virtually all photos posted on this forum of lights and lighting, are fairly meaningless. And of top of that, the LEDs in the DRLs will probably have huge gaps in their color spectrum making them unpredictable at best when shooting them or the light they produce.

 

No, no, no, no, and no. The photos were taken with my cellphone, not with professional equipment. That's why I also tried to describe what I see when looking at the headlights compared to the foglights when they're on, and in a reflection off a window glass at night. Take it for what it's worth, which may be nothing. But to my eyes these bulbs are whiter than the OEM bulbs, and seem to provide better light when driving.