LED H11 Low and Fog Lights

Its the internet, don't believe everything you read you foolish one. I don't have any faith in the test as they are out dated and still don't agree with them and you will not change my mind. I have made it this far in life and still make my own decisions!

 

i don't know why crash even bothers anymore haha

 

It is people judging by the foreground light, as discussed by one of the worlds top automotive lighting experts in the article I linked. They don’t understand what to look for, see big a big increase in foreground light and think it is better since that is what their eyes tell them (as foreground light is how humans judge light) even though the opposite is true. It is all explainable with basic science.

 

They probably have their dash lights cranked too..

 

Lol. It's math. You know, calculations? Whether they're on the internet or carved into a tree trunk, they still mean the exact same thing. Also, I'm not sure how the testing is "outdated" when the exact bulbs that you are using have been mathematically proven to be shit. Again, it's math. The numbers don't lie and will never change over time. 2 + 2 will ALWAYS = 4. And I'm happy to hear that you make your own decisions. Congratulations. You should. You're a big boy, all grown up. My only question is, what are your decisions based on? I'll bet it's not math... Anyway, thanks for proving my point... Oh, and I was never trying to change your mind. I'm only trying to help all of the misguided children out there.

 

You and @crashnburn80 need to start a charitable organization to inform all the misguided children on the 3GT Facebook groups. LED retrofit recommendations come up about every 3 hours. So much bad advice. The blind leading the blind, literally.

My neighbor just swapped his OEM LEDs for a set of Alpharex headlights based on recommendations he read on one of the groups.

 

Painful. Swapping some of the best headlights for some of the worst. He probably thought they were a great improvement too, since those lights are not properly engineered and blow out the pattern with crazy amounts of foreground light and lost distance light, which as shown cause people to believe they have better lighting than they do.

 

I hate to admit it, but state inspections that check this kind of stuff would be a huge help. I live in a state with no inspections. It's so scary and cringe I can't even describe it, how dangerous some people's vehicles are. Top it off with the LED issues and 2 lane shitty roads. Hated the inspections when I lived in CA - was only there for a year - calm down but missed them after first year of no inspections. I've seen some things. Like someone's front end not turning but the back end does... Like an average of 1/2 the drivers on the road with one headlight AND one tail light. Both. Anyways, I said it earlier and I meant it:

Ignorance is bliss

 

CA has inspections? do you mean smog checks?

I've been driving for almost 18 years now and have never gone through a single inspection.

 

Yes they did a smog check and all that but I thought it was other stuff too. Guess I'm wrong?
Regardless, you wouldnt see 40% of Montana vehicles passing it.

 

i've only had one car old enough to have to go through a smog check but all i remember them doing is sticking a thing up the exhaust and running it on a machine. they don't check headlights and stuff.

i wish they did too. too many guys with not just ebay LED's but also in different colors. and don't get me started on guys with blacked out tinted tail lights...

it's really up to the cops to enforce these little things but i guess they can't be bothered.

 

This is the reason I love this Forum... All the answers one needs, with a little sarcasm mixed in..

Thanks Ya'll..

 

While I get the whole thing about not believing everything you read, the difference here is that a member of this forum sunk a lot of time, money and aggravation to put together a consistent testing method, paired with accurate tools to make good comparisons with. And he has spent the last few years testing lots of bulbs that he, or others have sent him.

From that testing there's been several things that consistently occur: most LED retrofit bulbs do not properly focus, and this results in shifting where the highest intensity light is being directed. This translates to worse performance in the real world, where everyone drives, because of a few easy to underatand but not plainly obvious concepts about how human vision actually works. These are often at odds with how we/you/average joe perceives how well we can see.

Believe it or not these testing and comparison threads are the hands down best comparisons that I've found. There's plenty of places you can go to ask questions and get legitimate help/answers from engineers with access to the data. But they're not doing anythong to show their results, because their knowledge is usually tied to their work. This results in the "just trust me, bro," brush off. Whereas Crash has assembled a ton of hands on test data, which is free for anyone to look at, and because his test method is consistent, and his tools are accurate (unlike TheRetrofitSource, HeadlightRevolution,etc) you can draw actual apples-to-apples comparisons across all of his tests. And the dude doesn't even have a tacoma anymore. He could have moved on to a jeep forum and stopped posting here. Instead he's still doing tests and trying to point people in the right direction.

 

I'm just starting to delve into aftermarket light bulbs. I get the whole frivolity of using an LED in a Halogen projection housing. Being an electrician by trade, I understand lumens, watts, etc. What I'm seeing in halogen specs is 55watts and 1400ish lumens (lowbeam 2000ish high beam) across the board regardless of brand or price. And I also understand, in my realm, that just because a manufacturer states their product specs are xxxx lumens, it's not always comparable to another brand's same lumen specified output. So, all that being said what is the brightest longest throw lamp for the Tacoma that is still street legal? I've been surfing and reading for a week now...

 

See post#2 H11 and H9 halogen recommendations.

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads...11-projector-headlights.589465/#post-19689309

 

I forgot to mention that I have a KDMax tune and am concerned about adverse effects to that from weird amp draws or back emf. When I got the tune the tech saw my wire from the battery for my cap/topper lighting and asked what it was due to that fact. But maybe that is only an issue when installing the tune? BTW, thanks for the link info
chstaco

 

The H9 swap will be fine. A halogen for a halogen isn't going to cause emf issues, and your lowbeam circuit can handle the extra 20 nominal watt draw.

 

The place for your answers for all things 3rd Gen headlights is all in this thread:
https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/3rd-gen-hid-vs-led-vs-halogen-h11-projector-headlights.589465/

But specifically, for halogens an H11 has a nominal rating of 1250 lumens, and an H9 2100 lumens, this is basically a required spec for the bulb classification to be legal. But that is a nominal rating, manufactures are allowed a +/-15% variance on the required spec for a legal bulb, so just because 2 bulbs are listed as the same output, it doesn't mean they actually are. It is important to note these are real output specs from legitimate manufactures, and not made up numbers like many aftermarket LEDs. A 65w nominally rated H9, may actually pull 75w in the case of Philips H9s. But lumens actually isn't as important as focus. High performance halogen stock wattage bulbs don't actually produce significantly more lumens, instead they use smaller high precision filaments to make the light source smaller, which increases focus and provides significantly higher output intensity so the headlight is more efficient and projects a brighter hotspot further. You can see a short article by Philips explaining how this works here. And this is partly why LEDs don't work. Shrinking the light source filament fractions of a mm has huge performance gains, and the LEDs are massive by comparison to a halogen filament, (they also don't provide correct omni-directional light) so rather than shrinking the light source the LEDs have made it huge. And a huge light source doesn't have focus, which reduces the hot spot, which reduces the distance projection and shifts the pattern to foreground light. It is all very basic optics/science. So a lower lumen output halogen can easily outperform a higher output LED because of focus. Most (not all) LEDs also have made up lumen output specs, typically by claiming max theoretical output of a single chip, multiple by number of chips and using the total value. It doesn't work that way in reality. LEDs operate nowhere near their max output, much less once hot packed with several other LEDs, and LED output goes down as the product heats up, so the actual value ends of being a fraction of the promised spec. Add then the issues with focus mentioned above and it is easy to see how they are over promised and under delivered.

As for best bulbs, see post #2 in the thread above. For performance H11s that is the Tungsram Platinums or Xenon +120 (formerly GE) or for even better gains the Philips H9 in the low beams if you don't mind modding the base of the bulb or removing the plug on your OEM harness to allow for use of an H9.

 

Suggest thread title change to match the comments here “Someone on the Internet is Wrong!”



Lots of good info here and in the posted links however whatever headlights you have if you like them enjoy. As long as they don’t blind me. lol

 

I wonder if crashnburn80 were to post in braille, some folks may understand better?