Quote:
Originally Posted by harborman
I actually hate those bright white LED head lights that blind you. The older filament type are much more easy on the eyes. I also think if one needs such a bright head light maybe they should not be driving !
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The irony is that most of those bright white LED headlights aren’t actually any brighter than the halogen bulbs they replaced, they just do such a poor job of replicating the optics of the original bulb that they ruin the beam pattern of the lamp and spray light in the eyes of oncoming traffic (or, if they’ve been installed in pre-1997 USA-spec lights, those are designed without a proper cutoff to the low beam pattern to begin with, with predictable results when you install a flawed LED retrofit…). And of course the “whiter” light is why I specified an upper “whiteness” limit of 5500 K in my original post.
I actually did go ahead and email Dan Stern yesterday, as suggested above, and he responded right away, saying pretty much exactly what I expected him to say: “First principles; halogen lamps need to use halogen bulbs. The ‘LED bulbs’ now flooding the market (like ‘HID kits’ before them), claiming to convert halogen headlamps, are not a legitimate, safe, effective, or legal product. No matter whose name is on them or what the vendor claims, these are a fraudulent scam. They are not capable of producing the right amounts of light, nor producing it in the right pattern for the lamp's optics to work.”
But I’m still holding out hope that the role of the 928’s driving lamps being what it is (i.e. providing the flash-to-pass function when the pop-up headlamps are stowed, more so than any meaningful contribution to the high beam pattern), I’ll eventually find an LED retrofit well-designed enough to serve that purpose—even if the beam pattern ends up a little bit sloppy, well, the whole point of flashing the high beams is to get someone’s attention, right?