Headlight bulbs: halogen vs. LED?

[jonathan909]

The Legacy/Outback headlights seem uniformly terrible - our '95, '98, and '99 really are dangerous to drive at night, especially given the deer (that claimed two cars last year).  The Foresters - with their huge lights - are vastly superior.  So we've got to do what we can to crank up the brightness on the former, and I'm looking for the modern opinion.

(Btw, if my notes are correct, the '95 needs 9003=HB2=H4, while the '98/'99 use 9007.  Please correct me if I have this wrong.  And the lenses still look pretty clear since my last Meguire's treatment.)

Some time back there was a strong recommendation here for Philips Crystal Vision Plus (though I can't see the Plus online now, so perhaps it's been replaced by the Ultra) as the best halogen around particularly in terms of longevity.

But I'm seeing a lot of LEDs out there (meaning "Amazon") that are only a few bucks more.

We need bright, and I mean BRIGHT.  What say you all?
 

[FerGloyale]

13 minutes ago, jonathan909 said:

 

(Btw, if my notes are correct, the '95 needs 9003=HB2=H4, while the '98/'99 use 9007.  Please correct me if I have this wrong.  And the lenses still look pretty clear since my last Meguire's treatment.)

 

 

Meguire treatment?  If it's some wipe on stuff that ain't gonna cut it.  Cracked yellow plastic has terrible optical quality.  They look clear to you, but their ability to pass light is still gonna suck.

You need the 3m polishing kit, a drill, and some patience.  Fully grind and polish off all the old yellow plastic.

That will help tons.

LEDs are obnoxious. 

[jonathan909]

The Meguire kit -  drill-driven pad, a couple of wet+dry papers to 2000 (iIrc), polish, and UV protectant which seems to help.  I posted previously on this kit vs. Mothers.

"LEDs are obnoxious" doesn't begin to approach "informative".  The question was about effective brightness.  Qualitative opinions require explanation.

 

[FerGloyale]

30 minutes ago, jonathan909 said:

The Meguire kit -  drill-driven pad, a couple of wet+dry papers to 2000 (iIrc), polish, and UV protectant which seems to help.  I posted previously on this kit vs. Mothers.

"LEDs are obnoxious" doesn't begin to approach "informative".  The question was about effective brightness.  Qualitative opinions require explanation.

 

3m Kit goes 300, 600,1500, 2000, 3000, then to polish pad.  You've got to wet sand all of them, aggressively go at them with the first stages, 300,600 and then fully sand at every stage and then polish from there.  No silly UV smear, it's already polycarbonate......goo distorts the light (i.E. ruins the optical quality of the polish)

 As for informative about effective brightness.  LEDs are effectively so bright they can blind someone and cause them to lose control, possibly head on into you.

I would say that when another driver finds them so bright as to be obnoxious, that is also a relevant observation.  It's not all about you're ability to see, but everybody on the roads ability to see.  

Do what you want with your brights, I guess.......But your low beams that everyone has to look at should not blind others so you think you can see  a little better.

Edited June 23, 2019 by FerGloyale

[el_freddo]

Low beam on the Gen3 is always going to suck balls. We manage this with good quality globes and a set of good quality auxiliary driving lights to bring up the brightness as soon as the passing car is gone. 

 

As for LEDs - I’m with FerGloyale - obnoxious. The LED bars especially. Wrong colour. A bluish light is not what you want for driving with. It’s a scattered light wave. A white-yellowish light is best, particularly in fog. This light is a stable light. Those really white Crystal Vision globes are pretty good, I think we have them in our Pajero (I haven’t looked into this yet)

Adding a set of relays right near the light could work - but the lense will probably let you down after all that work.

At the end of the day, without upping the low beam wattage and annoing other drivers, there’s not much you can do really. 

Cheers 

Bennie

[jonathan909]

3 hours ago, FerGloyale said:

3m Kit goes 300, 600,1500, 2000, 3000, then to polish pad.  You've got to wet sand all of them, aggressively go at them with the first stages, 300,600 and then fully sand at every stage and then polish from there.  No silly UV smear, it's already polycarbonate......goo distorts the light (i.E. ruins the optical quality of the polish)

Dude, look at my avatar and you'll get that I understand wet sanding - not just for cosmetics, but for performance (though actually less on the TriFoiler than on the catamarans).  And from what I've seen the UV coating really makes a difference on these things - without it (that is, when I used the Mothers kit) the lens fogged again within months; with it the degradation of the lens has been slowed.  I actually have the laboratory equipment here for a spectral transmissibility analysis, but at the moment I'm just going by subjective observation.

3 hours ago, FerGloyale said:

 As for informative about effective brightness.  LEDs are effectively so bright they can blind someone and cause them to lose control, possibly head on into you.

I would say that when another driver finds them so bright as to be obnoxious, that is also a relevant observation.  It's not all about you're ability to see, but everybody on the roads ability to see.  

Do what you want with your brights, I guess.......But your low beams that everyone has to look at should not blind others so you think you can see  a little better.

You need to understand what I'm talking about here.  I live in the country and wrote off two cars last year to deer strikes.  Prior to that I wrote off a third in addition to a number of incidental non-writeoff collisions since we moved out here.  Earlier this year a moose ran my girls off the road (moose are no joke - they kill people in cars).  According to both the police and the body shops, half of the accidents reported in this area are from collisions with these stupid vermin.  Overall, they present a much greater hazard than you suggest from oncoming traffic, and I couldn't give a bright orange sh!t what you or anyone else find "obnoxious" about a headlight's colour temperature.  I'm not going to intentionally create a hazard for other drivers (nor do I want to attract tickets), but beyond that I'll do what's necessary to make these awful, substandard headlights minimally safe.

[FerGloyale]

9 hours ago, jonathan909 said:

Dude, look at my avatar and you'll get that I understand wet sanding - not just for cosmetics, but for performance (though actually less on the TriFoiler than on the catamarans).  And from what I've seen the UV coating really makes a difference on these things - without it (that is, when I used the Mothers kit) the lens fogged again within months; with it the degradation of the lens has been slowed.  I actually have the laboratory equipment here for a spectral transmissibility analysis, but at the moment I'm just going by subjective observation.

You need to understand what I'm talking about here.  I live in the country and wrote off two cars last year to deer strikes.  Prior to that I wrote off a third in addition to a number of incidental non-writeoff collisions since we moved out here.  Earlier this year a moose ran my girls off the road (moose are no joke - they kill people in cars).  According to both the police and the body shops, half of the accidents reported in this area are from collisions with these stupid vermin.  Overall, they present a much greater hazard than you suggest from oncoming traffic, and I couldn't give a bright orange sh!t what you or anyone else find "obnoxious" about a headlight's colour temperature.  I'm not going to intentionally create a hazard for other drivers (nor do I want to attract tickets), but beyond that I'll do what's necessary to make these awful, substandard headlights minimally safe.

I used to lapidary optical glass.  I know.  Your lenses fogged again after months because you didn't get deep enough on your first 2 grits.

And you can't smear a product to an optical smoothness.  how smooth can you ice a cake?  not like polished glass.  Goo distorts the light.

I polished my wife's 03, 2 years ago, and run regular Halogens and we can see fine.  I live in the woods too.  We have Elk.

Sounds like you need to invest in a bull bar, Make your auxillary lights brighter, and maybe slow down?

If you are blinding oncoming cars, you may see the moose or deer, but then THEY CAN'T!

I also know that here in the US, lots of people are adding Non-street legal LEDs that are even worse.  

Again, add auxiliary lighting that you can use when no other traffic, and you can turn off as others pass by.  Blinding people is not cool.

My last thoughts on the subject.

 

 

[1 Lucky Texan]

I second the addition of auxiliary lights. LEDs in a reflector designed for a filament will splatter all over the place.

[jonathan909]

5 hours ago, FerGloyale said:

I used to lapidary optical glass.  I know.  Your lenses fogged again after months because you didn't get deep enough on your first 2 grits.

And you can't smear a product to an optical smoothness.  how smooth can you ice a cake?  not like polished glass.  Goo distorts the light.

Your argument would hold water if we were talking about glass, but if these headlights were made of glass, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because the headlights wouldn't suffer UV degradation.  Okay, they might, but over the span of hundreds of years, not a few.  You know perfectly well that plastics don't behave as do glasses, and that not everything just sits on the surface.  Plastics absorb.

Quote

I polished my wife's 03, 2 years ago, and run regular Halogens and we can see fine.  I live in the woods too.  We have Elk.

Sounds like you need to invest in a bull bar, Make your auxillary lights brighter, and maybe slow down?

If you are blinding oncoming cars, you may see the moose or deer, but then THEY CAN'T!

I also know that here in the US, lots of people are adding Non-street legal LEDs that are even worse.  

Again, add auxiliary lighting that you can use when no other traffic, and you can turn off as others pass by.  Blinding people is not cool.

My last thoughts on the subject.

Which, unfortunately, doesn't really answer the question I asked.  Apparently the only way to get a nuanced answer is to get a set and try them out.

And btw, we have elk here too - but they don't behave at all like the deer.  They travel in pretty big herds, when they cross the road they take their time, and there's no missing them - unless you've got terrible lights (or, yes, you're going way too fast).  Deer are so stupid, fast, and unpredictable that one of our writeoffs was a product of the deer broadsiding us.  It launched out of a deep ditch (where we couldn't see it from the road) as we passed, slamming into the front fender and rolling along the length of the car, wiping off the mirror and pushing in every body panel along the way.

Edited June 23, 2019 by jonathan909

[jonathan909]

4 hours ago, 1 Lucky Texan said:

I second the addition of auxiliary lights. LEDs in a reflector designed for a filament will splatter all over the place.

It's a good point.  The illumination from a handful of point sources isn't going to be as uniform as that from a single filament.  Again, though, I think the only way to find out how much and what kind of difference it means is to try them.

[1 Lucky Texan]

Daniel Stern may still have a website devoted to auto headlights.

I have seen one type of LED aftermarket that had a cone on which the led was 'back firing', seemed to be trying to duplicate a properly oriented line source.....? And, some I think have set screws so you can rotate them to try to create a good cut-off line.

Dumping the heat is yet another problem for some folks. There's a little fan or some heatsink - some flexible - that sometimes requires deleting or modifying any rear cover on the light assembly

Morimoto or other HID projector upgrades are often considered better than LED..

 

if any position on the car uses 9005 or 9006 bulbs, there's a 'hack' allowing use of HIR bulbs (Toshiba?) 9011 and  9012  - supposedly about 20% brighter. Just filing a tab down so the bulb will bayonet into the holder.

 

there may be some good youtube video comparisons on this subject.

Edited June 24, 2019 by 1 Lucky Texan

[carfreak85]

12 hours ago, 1 Lucky Texan said:

Daniel Stern may still have a website devoted to auto headlights.

http://www.danielsternlighting.com/tech/bulbs/Hid/conversions/conversions.html

This article was written when cheap HIDs were all rage, but LEDs have the same root flaw that makes them unsuitable for halogen lamps; the source of light is a different shape and reacts with the reflectors in a different way.

If you need more light, get BIG, BRIGHT auxiliary lamps, not garbage plug'n'play LEDs.