I don't entirely agree. First, the photos referenced are not photographically equal. The halogen photo is pretty well focused. The others are not, which is partly due to the camera's interpretation of available light in a night time photo. Much of the lack of detail can be attributed to lack of focus.
Secondly, these are just photos. Your eyes don't see the world the way a camera does. While the camera can not record something it does not see (nor can we), it also can not interpret what it sees moment to moment, whereas we can. As such, details on the road are far more apparent in real time to our eyes than they will be to a camera in a single photo image.
Third, the HID's or whatever were used to produce the washed out photos were aimed very badly. Pointing that much light directly at the road is going to give you a great deal of glare and bounced back light. It might make for a photo that looks intensely bright, and it is, it is not a wise use of the available light, and accounts for much of the "harshness" and "unpleasantness" mentioned. Properly aimed and properly focused for the application they are neither harsh nor unpleasant.
Fourth, look at the distance down the road which you can see with the halogen light versus the other light. Obviously I can't tell how the halogens are aimed, or even if they are brights or dims for that matter, but the down-road vision with the halogens is just not there. With the others, the down road vision is something like 8 times greater, and that is with them aimed too far down.
For close-in vision at night you need diffused light, not hot spotlights. Many of the lights we have been seeing in photos on the board recently have been of the spot variety, such as Light Force and so on. These lights are only best at spot focus lighting, which is not appropriate for close in work. Of the 8 forward facing HID's I use for night racing, NONE are spots, 4 are flood lights, and 4 are driving beams. The light is spread over a bit more than 180 degrees or range which offers full vision including peripheral without significant changes in light density. Only the driving lights will reach out to a quarter mile or more, and they are all focused in the front 45 degrees where they do the most good, and none are aimed so as to reach the ground with the hottest spot of light any closer to the car than about 100 feet. The close in lighting is all flood light which is so soft that there is no "hot spot" to find. The color rendition is essentially white, not blue, and because the close light is not as hot as shown in most of the photos referenced above, a great deal more definition is there to see, and far more than halogens can provide.
The LED's are a different story as nearly as I can tell. I have not seen the new light bars in the real world, but have several LED lights of varying intensity up to one watt, and the light is essentially blue, not white. This likely accounts for the lack of color definition in use mentioned by others. Everything illuminated is reflecting blue-shifted light, which confuses our eyes. Blue light is also more diffuse by its nature, and will not penetrate distances well, nor penetrate things like fog and dust worth a darn. In dust, you would need to turn the LED straight off or you won't be able to see 10 feet. The blueness of the light to some extent is the reason you sense less definition in road detail, simply because blue-shifted light does not offer detail. That is why blue light sources suck as headlights, whether they are halogen based, HID or LED, and it is why I never use HID lamps over 4,300K for road or off road lighting. The 6,000K and hotter lights are so blue and purple that you can't tell where on the planet you are, no matter how bright they may appear to be.
Another feature of the LED as I see it is that you can't alter the focus of the light. Each of the LED's has its own lens, and to produce light in usable quantity, it has to be pre-focused by the LED itself, as LED's are not really omni-directional emitters of light, nor are they all that strong. Some of the light bars are using 40 LED's at 3 watts each to produce the light that you see.
So I see the LED bars are useful if carefully applied, but I would use them for generalized lighting, and would probably use some other light source for the central down road lighting needed for night driving, whether that would be HID's or high output halogens, just to stay away from the blue light for critical vision needs.
