I strive to offer the latest and greatest at Audette Collection, what I call "Best-in-Class" products. For the last 5-6 years the best way to have LED headlights has been to install complete LED assemblies. This approach had been based on input from automotive lighting expert (guru really) Daniel Stern, who has long acted as the lighting consultant to Audette Collection. Many of you here know of and have dealt with Daniel. For those of you who are not familiar with him he currently serves as Chief Editor of Driving Vision News and has qualifications too numerous to list here. If you're interested there's more about Daniel at the AC Shop website.
I've stayed away from using LED bulbs in place of halogen bulbs in reflector headlights based on Daniel's advice. He is fiercely opposed to the practice and, as with everything else he does, he bases his judgement on science. If you are interested in the science you will a detailed report by Daniel at his website. Click here for a more recent article on the topic.
Is It Time?
However, as we know, technology is always moving forward. There are some manufacturers who now claim that they are making LED bulbs that are correctly configured for reflector headlights designed for halogen bulbs. So it's time to start digging in. It's a lot cheaper and easier to achieve LED headlight lighting by simply swapping LED bulbs for halogen bulbs. Is it time? I asked Daniel that question and this is what he said (warning, he always speaks very directly):
There are, at most, four LED bulbs that work acceptably well to very well in _some_ headlamps designed to take an H4 halogen bulb. One to two of them are made by Philips and one to two of them are made by Osram—both within product lines that contains other designs of "H4 LED bulb" as well. Move away from Osram and Philips and you are headed in a bad direction; each and every last single one of these Chinese trinkets like the one in the email you forwarded (no matter whether it's advertised and marketed that way or by other promotional means) is unsafe, ineffective garbage—without exception.
I mentioned to him that I had read some favorable reviews about the latest generation of LED bulbs designed to replace halogen bulbs and here is his (highly edited for the sake of brevity, context preserved):
Yeah, that's a problem: the web is lousy with people handing out advice and recommendations they are not qualified to be handing out.
With lighting there's the difficulty that what we feel like we're seeing isn't what we're actually seeing. The human visual system is a lousy judge of how well it's doing. "I know what I can see!" seems reasonable, but it doesn't square up with reality because we humans are just not well equipped to accurately evaluate how well or poorly we can see (or how well a headlamp works). Our subjective impressions tend to be very far out of line with objective, real measurements of how well we can (or can't) see.
The primary factor that drives subjective ratings of headlamps is foreground light, that is light on the road surface close to the vehicle…which is almost irrelevant; it barely even makes it onto the _bottom_ of the list of factors that determine a headlamp's actual safety performance. A moderate amount of foreground light is necessary so we can use our peripheral vision to keep track of the lane lines and keep our focus up the road where it should be, but too much foreground light works against us: it draws our gaze downward even if we consciously try to keep looking far ahead, and the bright pool of light causes our pupils to constrict, which destroys our distance vision. All of this while creating the feeling that we've got "good" lights. It's not because we're lying to ourselves or fooling ourselves or anything like that, it's because our visual systems just don't work the way it feels like they work.
And it's a safety double-whammy because most poor-quality headlamps produce just about nothing _but_ foreground light: a wash of light close to the vehicle, but no concentrated hot spot to throw light down the road where you need it, so you get severely deficient seeing distance
Triple-whammy because while it takes a big increase in intensity to give significantly better driver vision, it takes only a small increase in intensity to give significantly worse glare and back dazzle. What looks like a trivial increase in the amount of above-horizontal light on low beam when it's shone on a wall, or a trivial decrease near the hot spot (if any such difference is even noticed, which it often is not) often amounts to a severe degradation of the headlamp's safety performance. These differences can be well and truly imperceptible to those who do not really know what they're looking at or looking for, but they are nevertheless real and exert strong effects on how well the headlamp can do its job. So looking at headlight beams on a wall or in pictures on the internet and going "See? Same beam!" is a nonstarter.
The upshot of this is that most internet "reviews" of a headlamp are useless at best—and that would be the case even if we ignore the bogus criteria people often use when "reviewing" headlamps: sharp cutoff on low beam! Eleventy thousand lumens! 6500K Kelvin Color Temperature! IP68! Osram chips! and so on.
Whew! See what I have to process on a continuing basis? Invaluable to serving my customers well though.
In any event we're going to try the Philips LED bulbs that Daniel mentioned and I will report back with my - subjective - observations.
Cheers,
John
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