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- What Exactly Do You Mean by Led Headlights?
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- But I Have Seen Comparison Tests Where LEDs Looked Like A Clear upgrade.
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In this blog, we’re talking about the kind of aftermarket LED (Light Emitting Diode) lights that fit directly into a car’s stock light housing—housings that were originally designed to work with incandescent halogen bulbs. These are sometimes called “LED replacements” or “LED bulbs.” We’re not talking about cars that come with LEDs from the factory...
LED lighting’s been around for decades, and it’s crept into the automotive aftermarket in waves. Circa 2005 is the first time I remember seeing LED “bulb replacements” in auto parts stores, as in, the now-common kind made to fit in the same socket as standard filament bulbs for brake lights and turn signals. They were primitive back then. All the d...
LEDs, when housed and aimed correctly, can translate minimal input power into a lot of light, which is what makes the technology appealing in general. Everything else being equal, it seems like swapping power-hungry incandescent headlight bulbs for brighter lower-draw LEDs would be an upgrade on two fronts. Plus the “instant-on” effect and visual c...
Most car headlights are a lot more than just a bulb in a socket. A cradle of reflectors is shaped and angled so that light emitted from the filament of an incandescent bulb will be thrown down the road in a way that maximizes driver visibility without blinding oncoming traffic. Most LEDs don’t emit light from the same space in the headlight housing...
A few of the better-known companies selling and testing LED headlight replacements in 2020 havetaken pains to mimic the positioning of incandescent bulbs to address this problem but it’s only a small part of the lighting equation. In fact, I did a blog about this, pointing out why some LEDs seemed better than others when used as headlight retrofits...
Stern is a professional lighting consultant with significant work and published papers on the subject under his belt. In his words, straight from his CV: He’s also done extensive studying on LED headlight kits and retrofits, like the ones we’ve discussed on this site a few times. You can get his very detailed perspective on the matter from his own ...
The problem is that light reflectors designed for halogen bulbs are inherently incompatible with the light output of LEDs. Stern wrote: “...the near- and far-field light distribution is quite different to what the lamp’s optics were engineered for.” And as a result, the headlight’s beam pattern isn’t what it’s supposed to be, doesn’t line up with t...
Stern’s analogy: “I wear eyeglasses, and so does my next-door neighbor. It would be injurious and counterproductive for us to swap because even if they fit my face and look awesome, the optics don’t match my eyes (even if I think I can see OK with them).” “And it’s not because I picked the neighbor to the left instead of the neighbor to the right. ...
“Looking at beam patterns is not an accurate or adequate way of assessing them. Looking at pictures or videos of beam patterns is markedly worse,” Stern explained to me. I showed him Diode Dynamics’ goniophotometer test, and he agreed that this clip does a good job explaining why this tool is important in overcoming visual tricks to understanding h...
Stern: “If we’re talking about pics and vids, they’re very misleading even if the photographer has the best of intent. Pixels and film have a much narrower dynamic range than the human visual system, so even a photographer who carefully keeps all the camera settings identical when photographing different beams cannot present more than broadly gener...
