Beam comparison, halogen to led

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Just for fun, here’s an A/B of a halogen and a 9006 led in the same housing. It’s not something I’ll be using, im waiting on a cheap projector to experiment with.

I’ll offer my 2 cents on these pics. The led does a decent job of maintaining an upper cutoff, though it is not as crisp. The led loses the nice near-to-far distribution where the hottest light is immediately at the cutoff.

the bulb wattages are not the same. The halogen is 37w. The led compares more closely between a 55w low and 65w high beam.

the housing is a scrap late model f150 fog lamp.
 

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You're pointing it down at the floor at an angle. How about a pic with the beam horizontal to a wall? LED headlights get a bad rap, we've all had nasty ones coming at us at night. LED bulbs in halogen housings are likely the majority of the culprits. Thanks for sharing.
 
I'm still a halogen fan.
Cost per output is throwaway, spares easy to carry and insert on the road, and they fail individually.
I do shop them very carefully, order if I need to and carry spares (prepped if required).
Often the best bulb has a different 'keying' and mostly European, Philips, some Vosla.
Often an increase in light output means losing "LongLife, LL" designation.

I generally get the best choices (and key mods) by searching candlepowerforums AND my car type.

The retro leds all seem to have big add-ons to shed heat in the 'space' of the OE lamp - just doesn't look right to my eye (decades of electronics). If it needs all that heatsink, it should be on a big plate outside of the housing.
 
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Responding to questions:

1. it’s a reflector type fog light housing from an f150. Admittedly, the care they took in designing the fog distribution is far superior to the poor headlamps. i wish the headlamps were on par with the fogs.

2. The bulb type is a generic, inexpensive led. Same dimensions afai can tell of the higher priced models. Again, I’m tinkering here so cheap is best (and probably just as good).


3. Pic on wall: I’ll have to wait for an evening where we aren’t busy - there are no uncluttered wall spaces in my garage for a daytime pic. BUT, since the light is more or less aligned with the near apparent angle of the camera, it should be the same apparent shape, if that makes sense?

when the projector housings come in, Ill try to do a follow up. I did at least appreciate seeing that the upper cutoff was preserved more closely with last era’s hid kits.

the positive for LEDs. In a larger reflector assembly, they might be almost tolerable, such as a 7“ reflector. Of course, few vehicles run those anymore.

m
 
DIFFERENT housing, comparing halogen to LED.

This is a cheap projector from amazon, https://www.amazon.com/iJDMTOY-2-25...00KTNBDXQ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

I picked it up along with the LED (link above) to tinker a bit with. All in all, it's probably all going back for a refund, but here's the skinny before it goes.

1st pic is the halogen H3 included with the lamp. It has some sort of cutoff, and a bit of leakage going upwards on each side. It's got a pretty pronounced lower ring on the ground, which won't do anything good for distance vision. Still, as an augmentation to low beams, I've had vehicles which would have been helped by these, as you can see that the hotspot is still forward in the beam, centered reasonably below the cutoff on the garage door.

2nd pic is with the 9006 LED. The lamp accepts either. You can see how it loses control of the light. There's a ton of leakage off both sides, and less intensity in the distance where you want it. The glare on the sides really hurts its use in traffic. I wouldn't want someone else driving towards me with them.

3rd pick is with the lower part of the lens masked, a little on the bottom center working up to about a 3rd of it towards the outside R-L. That really knocks down the glare and restores the cutoff, but the distribution ends up with a lot of light in the nearfield where it hurts distance vision, and not a great amount left on the road ahead.

Keep in mind - the H3 has a lateral filament while the 9006 is axial, so that alone should cause inconsistency between swapping these two sources. The crispness of the LED makes me think this is intended for a 9006 originally.

NOT TRIED - and perhaps I need to... is a halogen 9006. The glare shield on the front of a 9006 might provide that crisp cutoff and avoid the glare off to the sides. Maybe. It's a stretch.

I believe that some tweaks to the internal glare shield could really make this thing pretty good - similar has been done with other projector models. These seem glued pretty effectively, however, and I'm weighing that $30 cost to experimentation as to whether I attempt to go there or just send them back.

So - out of the box I wouldn't use it, except maybe with the H3. With an LED drop-in, I definitely would not use it without modification. With mods, it could certainly provide better light than a lot of other products in its class.
 

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Follow-up. I did try one more... and that was to use a 9006 halogen in place of the 9006 led. It was daylight so I didn’t grab a pic. It was also wildly different. Control, cutoff and distribution was the best of the bunch. It looked good! Unfortunately, very limited light made it out of the housing, and naturally, the housing got really hot really fast in that configuration.

I decided that whatever mods might be needed to bulb shimming and cutoff shield alignment just wasn’t going to be worth the time, so I boxed it all up and sent it back.
 
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