The LED SAE J583 Fog Pod & Fog Light Review

I wish DD made a more "orange" color fog, similar to the morimotos

 

By orange you mean amber. And it is smart of them not to as selective yellow if far higher performing and amber is technically a signal color. But if you wanted amber lights, then I would look at KC Amber instead of Morimoto as the light is much higher quality. KC also offers amber covers for the Pro6 lights and Diode Dynamics offers amber driving light bars.

 

Thank you crashburn80 I had a few too many beers to be able to explain that last night lol.

 

thanks crash

 

and actually I missed you saying yellow, thought you meant were talking about white... my bad. disregard my illiterate ass

 

It's all good. I'm sure you had a couple beers last night also.

 

Does Diode Dynamics have a Memorial day sale usually? Been waiting to see when they do so I can pull the trigger on some fogs and some lenses.

 

What gauge metal are y'all using for your brackets?

 

I used .08 Aluminum.

 

16 gauge stainless (0.065).

 

For anyone curious, here's the BD Squadron Sport WC non-SAE (left) compared to the DD SS3 Pro (right). ​

The BD is obviously not meant to be a street fog light, but they still put out some great light offroad. I'll be mounting mine as ditch lights.

Anyway you can see the wider beam pattern of the DD's as well as the difference in cutoffs. What I found most interesting though was that the selective yellow of the the DD's is a slightly warmer deeper yellow than the BD amber. All of my reading on the internets had me expecting the other way around.

 

@Taquitoma it looks like the BD filters out less green than the DD's do. Could just be the spectrum difference of having to filter from a 5000k led versus the 4000k led of the DDs.

 

Nice comparison shots. I too have noticed that my S2 ditch lights are decidedly greener than the Diode SS3 fogs. Also nice to see a pattern comparison, it's easy to see why the offroad squadron shouldn't be run on the street.

That's my guess as well. Kudos to Diode Dynamics for making that decision instead of continuing the trend of handicapping selective yellows with high temperature emitters and heavy filtering.

 

Word from independent labs is that @Baja Designs failed to test the selective yellow chromaticity window entirely and their product fails to meet the SAE selective yellow requirement, meaning their "SAE selective yellow" does not actually meet the SAE selective yellow standard, as it is too green and is falsely advertised as SAE compliant. AKA it is not a legal color of selective yellow for street use. Yet another failure in their SAE product line. All SAE selective yellow lights tune the colored lens to the light source to ensure meeting the selective yellow chromaticity requirement. Both Rigid and Diode Dynamics optimized their selective yellow lights specifically for SAE with highly customized lens colors to match the legally required chromaticity window. It would appear that Baja just reused the existing squadron yellow lens with no color tuning to meet the legally required chromaticity window requirement, which is not how selective yellow works. Like at all.

 

I was just swapping my lenses and noticed that the clear lens does not have an SAE stamp like the selective yellow one does (bottom left).

 

Good catch. This is just due to product updates- original builds were stamped on the lamp body rather than the lens.

 

When we first tested the SAE selective yellow with our standard amber lens it did fail, by a miniscule amount. It was so close to passing that instead of making a custom lens, we decided to improve both the white and amber versions with a slightly warmer LED color temperature (4500k instead of 5000k). This subtle change brings the light within the selective yellow boundary points in combination with our amber lens and also as a white fog lamp to further reduce harsh white glare bare you get from higher color temperatures.

 

Thanks for the information, that makes sense to use a warmer color LED to keep your lenses the same and is a more efficient design choice than using darker lenses. Glad to see this detail was not overlooked. It was not clear that your SAE fogs are supposed to be 4500k when they are specifically advertised as 5000k. When I measured the white SAE squadrons most recently I got a color temp of 4875k, which I figured was reasonably close to the advertised 5000k spec (not knowing they are actually supposed to be 4500k). The first SAE Squadrons I measured came it an 4801k. It is possible that by being so close to the edge of the chromaticity window that the LED binning may not be tight enough and some units are shipping with too high of a color temp causing them to be out of spec. While there is always some variance in the LED color temp based on the binning, the units I received were both closer to 5000k than they were to 4500k.

 

If you've been waiting for a deal to jump on those Diode Dynamics SS3 fogs, get out the credit card. Got this in my email today.

Memorial Day SALE Starts NOW 20% Off SS3 LED Pods!
Save 20% with code USA20 at checkout!

 

Heck yeah, ordering some Pro yellows tonight! Thanks for the info.