Vehicle lighting resources

[James86004]

A couple of weeks ago while traveling after dark on I-17 in Arizona, we saw a couple of vehicles on the shoulder ahead with their hazards on. I slowed down from 65 mph to 55, and was glad I did because the reason those vehicles were there was because one of them had just hit an elk, and the bloody mess of the elk was spanning both lanes of the roadway. I was just able to see it in time to sneak by on the left shoulder.

We were in our 2004 Sprinter, which had the original headlights that were yellow with age. We decided it was time to replace those, and see about upgraded lighting. I started doing research on lighting, and quickly got very frustrated. There is so much noise about the topic on the internet, and a search on here didn't answer my questions, so I decided to write down what I am looking for.

On I-17 in particular, I find I need better low-beam performance. When someone passes me, I switch to low beams, but there are times when I just can't see the road very well with those, especially when the oncoming lights are annoying me.

When I go to the auto parts store, there are lines from Phillips, Sylvania, and Osram which each have 4 or 5 levels of the same size and wattage bulb. I could spend a lot of money seeing if each price increase results in progressively better performance. Then there are the LED replacements, but yikes, that opens up a lot of questions. I have seen a lot of headlights upgraded to LED that seem to put light in places where it doesn't belong, like into oncoming traffic.

Anyone have any good advice?

 

[chet6.7]

Have you thought about leaving the stock headlights in place and adding auxiliary fog and or driving lights?

 

[IdaSHO]

If the OEM headlights are yellowed/fogged due to age, Id start by replacing them.
Many people will claim that aftermarket are better, but I much prefer OEM.

Id start there, then if you are still unhappy, Id suggest going to a quality LED bulb with the new housings.
If you go that way, I suggest you pull reviews and ratings from https://bulbfacts.com/

 

[Ducky's Dad]

Yes, start by replacing the factory headlight assemblies. Not cheap but necessary because no amount of cleaning and polishing will make permanent improvements. Then, take the truck to a good tint shop and have them install clear film over the new lights, as if you had a new 911 to protect from road rash. Make sure the film is absolutely clear, no tint of any kind, but with UV protection if at all possible. As part of the decision to replace the headlight assemblies, you need to decide whether to use stock assemblies or to have the new ones retrofitted with projector lamps. This decision will depend on budget and on what type bulb/capsule your stock lights use. If you can find a halogen infrared capsule in your socket style. that is the best bang for the buck. If not, look at HID and LED conversions, not just drop-in units. Drop-ins are generally crap, especially LEDs. You need a reflector design that optimizes output for your particular light, and drop-ins won't provide that.

I have drop-in HIDs in the low beams of one truck, with HIRs in the high beams. If I had found the HIRs first, I would never have installed the HIDs. In another truck (2005 Dodge), the only practical option after I went through every high wattage halogen capsule that I could find, I bit the bullet and ordered HID projector conversions from RetroShop. They were a huge improvement over anything else I had tried. I also installed HIR capsules in my factory Hella fog lamps and they wereanother big improvement without scattering spurious light all over the place. Your 2004 Sprinter probably had headlights spec'd by the same idiot lighting engineers (and accountants) that spec'd the headlights on my Dodge, in spite of the Mercedes Benz participation in Chrysler at that time. So, I feel your pain. If you get HIDs or LEDs, make sure you know what you are doing with color temperature. Don't believe the BS about "daylight" color that most shops will feed you. Stick with something in the 4300-4600K range to optimize what you can actually see with the human eye.

The last thing to consider with your headlights might be increasing the gauge of the wires that feed those lights. There may be kits available to give you a fatter pipe to pass current to the lights with less voltage loss. That is a common problem on a lot of vehicles.

Last but not least, think seriously about adding some aux lighting to the front of the truck for those country roads. I have a pair of Hella halogen driving lights plus a pair of Hella Euro-Beam halogens, plus a good sized LED bar that illuminates everything in the vicinity, handy when I am lost in the boonies and can't find a path out. The advantage of halogen and LED over HID is that they are instant-on, whereas HIDs need a bit of time to warm up to full brightness. LEDs draw less amperage, but that's a non-issue when you are rolling down the highway.

 

[Hillbilly Heaven]

Yes if yellowed with age go ahead and purchase OEm housings. Aftermarket housing are just cheap junk clones of OEM and most will perform worse than your aged yellow ones.
Phillips X-tremeVision bulbs have been fantastic upgrade to any light I have used them in.

Do not even consider LED an upgrade to your lights. Your lens and reflector were engineered to work with an incandescent type bulb.

If you want to real scoop on automotive lighting just post your question on Candle Power forum. Well know experts in the field of lighting will steer you in the right and proper direction,
'https://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/forumdisplay.php?87-Automotive-Motorcycles-Included

 

[IdaSHO]

Do not even consider LED an upgrade to your lights. Your lens and reflector were engineered to work with an incandescent type bulb.

And today's good LED bulbs are designed as a direct drop in for incandescent.

LEDs of the past did not work well with typical housings designed for incandescent bulbs.
Not the case today.

Im running Techmax Mini's in my 2011 Superduty and the difference is staggering.
Same beam pattern, considerably brighter, less draw, and no glare.

https://www.amazon.com/TECHMAX-Headlight-Extremely-Heatsink-Conversion/dp/B07CBPV3WW

Highly advised. But again, consult bulb facts for your application/bulb type.

FYI, this is a great vid explaining and showing test results of various LEDs.
The Techmax segment starts at around the 3-minute mark

 

[Ducky's Dad]

Interesting video. Would be nice to know which headlight assembly they used for the test.

 

[IdaSHO]

Interesting video. Would be nice to know which headlight assembly they used for the test.

Test details located on their site.

BulbFacts | How We Test headlight bulbs

www.bulbfacts.com

 

[Ducky's Dad]

OEM 2009 VW Jetta (MK5) halogen headlight reflector (H7) was used for all reflector beam results set at 12 feet (3.66 meters)

 

[SixLug]

Headlight Revolution has some good videos about testing all types of lights in different types of housings. I have watched a few of them and they seem knowledgeable but I don’t know much past that. I know you can’t just stick any LED bulb on any housing and expect it to be better. You need to choose the right type for the housing you have.

 

[Hillbilly Heaven]

You said it all right here. This is a real problem in talking about lighting, it's nearly all bull and noise, this thread is no exception unfortunately.

At the risk of provoking further noise here I'll share what I know on the topic and then probably get told I'm dumb and wrong and then we'll have even more noise to trudge through.

Optics are manufactured around a particular type of emitter. This means reflectors or lenses built for an incandescent filament are going to be out of focus if you put a different type of emitter (LED or HID) in there. Even if that emitter costs a lot of money and lots of dudebros on the internet swear it's like, brighter bro.

I think it bears consideration that the engineers who develop automotive headlamps probably have some qualifications to back up their career and if they want to build a reflector or lens arrangement around an LED emitter they will, but if it was built around a filament emitter it was probably built a specific way for a reason. Often for DOT/SAE/ECE constrained products that had to do with the state of the regulation at the time the product was manufactured - noting that those regulations have changed a few times over the years too. As I understand it the present DOT language is written around the brightness of a focal peak on incandescent reflectors and that will necessarily produce different results when the same language is applied to the brightness of a uniform field projector (regardless of emitter technology) that does not have a focal peak.

The engineers who develop aftermarket retrofits and such are surely qualified as well but their goal is to sell you a product "for off road use only" and it doesn't have to be good for it to meet their design objective .

A light which "looks brighter" when you stand outside your vehicle and look back at it is not the same thing as "reveals more information about the road ahead" . These are two different things. A really good lamp will look fairly dim from outside its focal area because.. uhh.. light's not supposed to just get spammed out everywhere. You want to see what's ahead in the road there's no value in lighting up the dust on your windshield and raindrops or fog 10 feet above your car. If you think about the projector at a drive-in movie theater, its job is to light up the screen not the whole parking lot so if you look at the projector from below its focal range it doesn't look all that bright.

Near field glare is bad for your night vision. Pupils constrict when a lot of light hits your retina, that's how normal eyes function. If you're utterly blasting out light everywhere and it's reflecting back at you from the pavement 15 feet in front of your car it's going to negatively affect how many photons can get into your eyeballs from objects 100 meters up the road. At highway speed you don't really need to know anything about the road 10 feet ahead of you because you already drove over that by the time your mind could process it. You need that distant information. This is why optics are as important if not more important than lumens. You need the right light in the right place and eyeballs don't work exactly like digital cameras work.

A word on color temperature and CRI - light comes in different wavelengths, just like sound does. You have to keep that in mind, and keep in mind the task you're actually trying to accomplish. If you're serving food to somebody you want high CRI lighting so the colors of the food pop and look natural right? Because we're super excited by bright fresh looking food.

But when you're driving a car it's less important for you to admire the coat of the deer you're about to hit and more important that you get clear information about where it is. You want your eyes sharp, not watery and fatigued from looking at glare for hours.

That's where blue light comes in. Blue light is simply not great in headlights because it focuses just slightly forward of your retina. That's why illuminated blue signs look a little bit blurry compared to similar illuminated red signs of the same size, intensity and distance from you. That's not a subjective property or an opinion. In the case of headlights this effect reduces the crispness of illuminated objects in the distance which may make it harder for you to pick out the edges of something and the lack of focus also increases fatigue which will affect your comfort and mood on long night drives. Rich blue light is simply not desirable on headlamps for driving. You don't need to filter it out but you sure don't want it emphasized.

It becomes worthwhile to remember that in the case of LED emitters the diode itself always emits just one wavelength. There is no such thing as a white LED at the emitter level - they're actually blue LEDs. The diode is built with a phosphor filter in front of it which absorbs some of the blue light and re-emits it at longer wavelengths, like green and yellow. White is every visible wavelength and a white LED is really a blue LED which combines with yellow and green to produce white. The distance between the blue emitter and its phosphor filter is why you often see bluish or yellowish bands at the edge of areas illuminated by a white LED. This all matters where we talk about color because white LEDs still contain a ton of blue light and blue light sucks in the context of headlights. Incandescent lamps naturally make very little blue. For what it's worth, xenon/HID bulbs typically have a few color peaks from the excited gases but the overall bandwidth of visible light can be very consistent.

For the above reasons I choose to use halogen lamps for most of my forward illumination. Cost is not a factor nor is any inferred kinship to Ned Ludd. I don't have an opposition to LED in the correct applications but we must exercise nuance here and not resign ourselves to caveman thinking like "LED GOOD HALOGEN BAD!", it's just not that simple. You have to consider the objective and the mechanism or you're just slapping junk together and getting junk results.

I use LEDs in handheld flashlights. There battery life is a major consideration, I don't walk at 70mph and generally don't find myself depending on their illumination for a whole day. I also use LEDs in some household lamp applications but again I'm not trying to send the light to a specific location (up the road hundreds of feet..) so distributing the lighting everywhere is a good thing, and the fashion of household lighting is more toward warm color temperatures so most household LEDs have large remote phosphors (the visible orange bits you can often see) that cut down the blue LED emissions a lot. It's an apples/potatoes comparison.

So to wrap this up with specifics on what I personally use for illumination; I use the factory lamp assemblies in both of my vehicles but take the time to aim them properly and I use Wagner Night Defense bulbs. They're a white halogen bulb with zoned yellowish filters. It seems like a gimmick but after using them a couple years I'm sold, the gimmick works and my eyes don't get sore on all nighters. For high beam driving aux lamps I use PIAA 520 SMR lamps which are a purely white halogen beam in a pattern that I believe is well suited to highway speeds. I have them tied to my vehicle's high beams so dipping to low beams cuts the driving lights, which is a matter of simple convenience and mercy for oncoming drivers if I see their approach while running the full set on high.

With this arrangement I don't find it necessary to include an augmented low beam auxiliary lamp but if you happen to choose such a thing my advice would be to pay close attention to beam pattern. Whatever emitter technology you choose, get one that is either reflector or projector based (as in, you can't see the emitter directly when you look at the lamp assembly) so the vast majority of light emitted is constrained to the area in front of you and not wasted on the eyes of oncoming drivers.

Very well said!!! You can't beat the engineering and research put into most factory optics. There are exceptions like J.W. Speaker, Grote, TruckLite, Rigid Industries but most of those are additional lighting, J.W. Speaker and TruckLite do make well engineered oem replacement LED lamp assemblies. I suggest reading articles from Daniel Stern and post on Candle Power. It's truth without the marketing hype and perceived performance.

 

[James86004]

Thanks everyone for all your input. The signal to noise ratio here is far better than anywhere else I looked. Hopefully others find this thread useful.

A light which "looks brighter" when you stand outside your vehicle and look back at it is not the same thing as "reveals more information about the road ahead"

Thank you Shovel for summing up my concerns in such a short statement. "Looks brighter" is a problem in other places that automotive lighting. The security lights on the house we just bought were so blindingly bright you could see anything in the shadows, such as someone hiding in the bushes. I just disconnected 3/4 of them and I can see more of what is in my yard.

 

[luthj]

The T1N sprinter headlights have a few things you can do to address poor output. If the lenses are cloudy and yellow, you can wet sand and spray with 2k clear, that will make a big difference. Also check the service manual, and adjust the headlights. Its not unusual for them to be adjusted wrong. Also note the headlight adjuster switch on the left side of the steering wheel. it adjusts the headlights by a couple degrees up or down, adjusting up can help as well.

The next step would be a higher output bulb, a few extra lumens makes a difference. There are some bulbs which make more light for the same wattage, not cheap though.

The third step is to check the voltage at the light sockets (loaded). You are looking for at least 12.9V, ideally closer to 13.3V. The typical T1N alternator regulates around 13.7-14.1V depending on temperature. If the voltage of the alternator is good, and the lights are not getting at least 12.9V, you may have a bad ground, or worn out switch in the system. Remedy the issue, for more lumens.

The final step is to add Aux lights. You need to be careful on what you choose and how you aim it, if you want to use with other vehicles around. We opted for a ~250W actual 50" LED light bar on the roof. It obliterates the factory headlights, even on high beams. If you need to drive at night in remote areas (no other traffic), its the only way to go. Being so high, it easily clears obstacles, dips in the road, etc.

I have tried several LED and HID bulbs in the sprinters housing. None had good results, and blasted light all over the road, and into oncoming traffic. There may be some LED units now that could work.

With HIDs you basically need to apply a ceramic paint to either end of the main arc chamber. This can help reduce the poor patter. This needs to be done after measuring and comparing the filament location on the stock bulb.

 

[Madbodhi]

Candlepower forum is THE place for info on any lighting related question. (Copied from there) A Philips Xtreme Vision H7 (top pick among standard-power H7 bulbs) would give higher beam peak intensity without exceeding the regulated maximum luminous flux of the H7 bulb category.

In addition Daniel Stern Lighting is the go to for auto lighting . His tech articles are worth reading. I would clean an refurbish the lenses and check the voltage at the plug as a first step.