Do all replacement LED headlight bulbs suck?

[Skippy722]

Originally Posted by Bear

Right! Vehicles with oem led lighting are often very blinding, even the led "parking" lights! So it's not just after market installs. I get flashed sometimes, mostly on unlit country roads by low slung cars. And my lights ARE adjusted. But hey, I drive a pickup.

Hills are the worst, but there's nothing y'all can do about it. Some of those newer truck headlights are windshield height to my 300!

 

[Skippy722]

FWIW, here is the Diode Dynamics SL1 vs Philips 9011's. My phone didn't pick up on the color difference as much as I had hoped. In person, the 9011's have a much better hot spot than the SL1's and are WAY warmer in color. I think the warmer color will help with rain and fog. There is also less foreground light in person.

 

[meep]

it's subtle in the pictures but the 9011s seem to allow the housing to focus more light up at the upper cutoff, which is better for distance vision. I gotta applaud Skippy772. We invest in our projects and be default seek an improvement and tend to develop a faith-bias in it being better. It takes a lot of objectivity to take feedback in opposition with our first thoughts and work through it. Respect for that.

 

[Deontologist]

Originally Posted by meep

it's subtle in the pictures but the 9011s seem to allow the housing to focus more light up at the upper cutoff, which is better for distance vision. I gotta applaud Skippy772. We invest in our projects and be default seek an improvement and tend to develop a faith-bias in it being better. It takes a lot of objectivity to take feedback in opposition with our first thoughts and work through it. Respect for that.

I applaud Skippy772 as well. It's hard going against what we thought was correct. The Diode Dynamic bulbs are at best acceptable. The other LED bulbs on the market come nowhere close to the Diode Dynamic bulbs. If one must go LED, then yes, I would say go with DD, but as Skippy's observations show, there's an even better option: a good ol' halogen bulb (at least for a few more years!) And I apologize too for my demeaning tone in my earlier posts. The point isn't to make anyone feel bad or get angry. I just hope that anyone who comes across this post realizes that we're all in this together. You want to see better. I want you to see better. I've spent perhaps $1000 on LED and HID retrofits many years ago, and let's just say I'm glad I didn't die when I drove around for a week with a 9006 LED bulb plugged into a knockoff Chinese H1 projector (just imagine how vastly different the filament/LED chip positions are.) I have a good idea of what works and what doesn't work.

 

[Skippy722]

Thanks guys! Sometimes a person just needs some tough love

 

[E365]

After giving up on my full Morimoto projector/HID retrofit (not enough time right now, might pick it up next spring) I tried the Diode Dynamics SL1 (H11) in my 2015 Focus. I aimed them WAY LOWER than the factory setting and am still very pleased with the output/performance. Color is great. No cheesy blueishness that I can tell. Cutoff is quite reasonable for a reflector beam. Absolutely no worse cutoff than the stock halogen bulbs. Here's the SL1s

 

[Skippy722]

Yours seem "hotspot" or center heavy like mine were. Did you make sure they're clocked to fire out at 9 and 3?

 

[E365]

Originally Posted by Skippy722

Yours seem "hotspot" or center heavy like mine were. Did you make sure they're clocked to fire out at 9 and 3?

I did. I also rotated them slightly from their locked position back and forth a bit to see if anything changed, but it didn't do much. Would be nice if the distribution was better, but I'm just happy the cutoff is reasonable and in my opinion, safe. The original halogen distribution looked pretty much exactly the same, so I think Diode Dynamics did a good job replicating the output of a halogen. Overall very happy with them!