LED headlight kit review (from group buy)

Just got the kit today in the mail, cheers Jordan.

Thought this would be a handy comparison as I've already got 5000k HIDs from the last Supervision group buy.

I'll reserve my judgement until later, still need to take the car on a proper night drive but until then, here are some install info and preliminary impressions.

Initial photos and comments, obvious advantage are the units are far lighter and compact compared to the HID ballasts. Weight and space saving are always good. I now have a bit more space under the nose panel which is a tight squeeze with SELIN and dual AFM setup under there.









Installation, very easy, plug and play setup. Simply unscrew the heatsink to give yourself more space. Lock them in place and screw heatsink back on.

You can infact still keep the stock dust boots but they sit over the heatsinks which actually get quite hot. I'll let Jordz comment if this will affect LED life or not but it gets pretty dirty in the engine bay over time and I wouldn't advise running no dust boot.






Comparison photos 5000k HIDs:








HID in left headlight and LED on right side:






LED in both headlights:






I'll post some side by side photos in the next post as I need to make them in paint.

 

side by side comparison, have not touched the adjustments.

The HIDs are definitely more focused and I definitely think the light is more intense.

The LEDs light seems more dispersed like the stock halogen bulb beam and definitely has a wider pattern which seems to be more easily captured by the camera in darker photos but I maintain the HID beams are still definitely brighter.

Dark:



Light:



Overall it's hard to draw a conclusion just from inside a closed space. I'll report back after a night drive but to anyone with HIDs, if you do a lot of night driving, leave them in.

Advantages: LEDs turn on instantly, no HID warm up time and brighter than halogens which is good enough for me. Minor weight and space saving too if you're pedantic about trimming fat out of the car.

 

The difference focus/cutoff is interesting, might be better for you on the road as they'll throw further but might annoy oncomming drivers a bit more.

Any wiggle room in fitment of the led ones? Might get the cutoff more square if you move them in or out a bit.

 

it's an exact fit much like a H3/H3C bulb. Maybe the stock beam is supposed to be like that but it's been a long time since I had a halogen bulb so wouldn't know.

HID or not, we will never have awesome focus like real factory HIDs unless we get the 2k xenon projectors which can actually focus the HID light like the below (photo of my old DC2R with factory xenons):

 

Interesting thing with LED's. Watt for watt, they produce as much heat as an ordinary incandescent filament.
Secondly, the heat doesnt really affect life as much as affects the ligh output/brightness at the time. the hotter LED's get, the dimmer the output.

The "ballast" you get is really just a switching power supply that is just rapidly cycling the LED on and off above the speed we cant determine easily purely to reduce heat output. They will run on DC.

The spacing between the led elements and the slight shading effect of the led support is the heart of the issue with them and almost always creates beam focussing issues.

The position of the actual light source in any reflector/projector setup is crucial and even just the slight increase in distance between the 2 light sources is usually enough to create, not so much focussing problems, but slight focussing changes.

I tried some H7 type LED's in my bike which has really good headlight pair that a stock Zed could only dream about.
The 2 light sources are slightly too far apart which exagerates the beam height. the beam width is fine.
By the time I got the beam "cutoff" down to a reasonable height, too much light was being wasted directly in front of the bike. Too close to be of much use unless wheeling around, slowly in a carpark. Would have been good for night time trailrides if thats your thing!!!
But at 60k's your travelling at 18 meters/second. Allow an average "See/Think/Do" of at least half a second and if something pretty solid gets into the beam, your going to hit it.

High beam dispersed the beam too high AND too low to make it "long range".

The same was true for a pair of H4 inserts i used in my Pulsar. Again, placement of the light source is critical and the low beam was almost uselessly low and high beam up above the road.
In the end, I lifted up the lights to make low beam better and just dont use high beam at all.

However, the colour temp and output is awesome to drive behind. Wet roads light up as equally well as on dry roads with older halogens. However, even when aimed optimally for high beam, LED'd just dont seem to have the long range penetration of even an old halogen.

Just looking at Mike images seems to confirm my findings but to what appears a lesser extent that i experienced with reflector lights.
The light is a very comfortable colour but is tending to disperse a little higher and lower.

Ill be very interest to hear how they actually work out on the road.

E

 

Led lights should use Reflector/Lens designed for led lights.

Check the link below:

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/20W-100W...hash=item3abf062307:m:m7J2Hc5a10TMdDjPzpnexpQ

Led drivers/chips:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/10W-20W-30W...12V-to-DC30-38V-LED-Chips-Light-/141671490648

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/20W-30W-...153737?hash=item4aea0ac309:g:ewMAAOSwEeFVAIWf

"ballast" as they call that thing that get's in package with LED kit
Is actually DC-DC converter with integrated current limiting circuit.
Those High powered led chips are using 24-36VDC so DC-DC converter is needed to bring 12V to 24-36V range, and current limiting circuit will limit amount of current to the Led's, as too much current would damaged the tiny chips.

Of shelf products are as good as existing design allows for.

If you considering using LED's consider experimenting with them

I reckon that pair of 100w floodlights can bright the almost whole horizon if designed/setup properly.

 

Thats cool... but buy all that clobber, dick around with it to set up for automotive use, sealed boxes and what-not.......= a whole pile of money and meh imho.
Interesting goodies tho.

Simple way to get great light output and fool the plod is just use everyday 55w halogen bulbs and poke a simple DC-DC "buck-boost" converter in there and run the globes at 15v dc.
This will perform just as well as an HID, wont blacken the quartz and the globes last just fine.
Now, i know this will start torrent of crap "you cant run halogen glove over-voltage and blah blah. Theyll burn out, they melt the elements etcetera blah bushes"
Well sorry ladies, but you can. A giant multinational company recognised this in their dirtbikes and the globes last a long time. One of my Honda traibikes bikes had a dual charging system, one for the battery and the tail light and the other for the head and brake lights.
Separate regulator set at 15v for headlight was as bright as an HID!

150w continuous buck-boost converter about 40 clams wired into the low beam circuit.
Heres one I prepared earlier:



E

 

Exactly what I stated in the Jordz GB......

They don't seem to be utilising the projectors

It seems to be just throwing light out in a 'general direction' without any clear definition.

The Kelvins seem right because the light is a good colour, but maybe LED's need a dedicated projector (as someone else mentioned)

 

I drove it around last night, my HID kit was definitely the better setup and I've gone back to them. In real world conditions they produce more light but I can't capture it on camera. For whatever reason the LEDs produce light that the phone camera captures better hence the dark photos they appear the same.

To be fair, the supervision HID group buy was around $250-$300?

I've also got a spare ebay HID kit for spare parts that cost $100. Light was far dimmer. These LEDs were comparable to the cheap HID kit in terms of light.

 

Thats interesting.
Would it be fair to say that they represent an upgrade over stock halogens tho?

E

 

Not sure, haven't had stock H3 halogens for a long time but from what I recall, they were terrible.

 

To get a proper comparison in photos you'd need some proper camera gear set on manual everything and probably a correct choice of lens and possibly filter to match what the eyes would see. Your phone and any digital camera on auto is adjusting a whole pile of settings to try and get a 'good' photo which just normalises the images, if the light is brighter it'll dull the image, if it's whiter it'll add saturation. Remember the black and blue dress? Advertising photos of lighting only you gives you a vague hint of the light's character unless you know it's done properly.

 

what he says,

I was looking at Mike's comparison photos and thought the LEDs compared favorably enough.

To compare LED vs HID at the same distance, you could try downloading a light meter app for your phone. They aren't accurate enough to compare readings from one phone with another but if you had a 20m driveway you could cover up the light with LED and take a reading to compare to the same test with HID side.

 

Micky does it say cree anywhere on the box. At all. These are supposed to be cree led thats what they were advertised as.
Cree is a huge company in japan they are simply the best. Short from osman and 1 or 2 others.

Im very surprised that cree sold led to an American compay and there using American components and not cree

http://budgetlightforum.com/node/41084

 

MikeZ32, thanks for the un-biased review. The honesty is much appreciated and its valuable feedback for me to hand back to my suppliers. Sorry to hear they didnt out-do your current HIDs in output, but good to see they out perorm in a few other ways.

Worth noting that these only draw 35W (iirc) as opposed to the stock halogens drawing 55W. Thats still a 35ish percent reduction.

If you look through my posts on the GB i have a few comparison pictures up against regular halogen globes. They blow them out of the water, not that that is considerably hard to do. In my opinion light on the road is equally good to the HID kit I had in for a while, but my HID kit was also bought several years ago and has been out of the car for a while so it hards to make an accurate call on that alone. Regardless of comaprison to HID tho yes, these absolutely smoke stock globes.

Im having a hard time understanding this whole "reflector for LED lights" that a couple of people have referenced? I understand the concept, but as outlined in the GB the chips on the "globe" are at the same height as a stock halogen filament, so the projector should be...well...projecting the light to the same places as a halogen. I suppose that comes down the the second part of your quote i left up though.

 

I just want to point out that LED light is having specific angle of the light that is getting projected out of the chip, and let say that is around 30 degree.
Unlike halogen or HID globes that is 360 degree spread around the filament.
Thus projection is not getting equally bounced around.
However 55w of the LED lumen is far greater than halogen so output is visible but not in focus as designed projector is made for halogen globe.
In that perspective HID light is having more lumens per watts than halogen dispersing the light in the 360 degree as designed for halogen and effect is noticeably better.

 

Just came here to post basically the same thing, because there's more light focussed in a smaller angle from the bulb you're getting third, fourth or higher reflections in the housing that would normally be too dull to see still being fairly bright. The best and probably most expensive solution to get oem or better diffusion with LED retrofits would be to incorporate a custom lens into the bulb to spread the light. You could probably make a fair improvement with a couple of reflectors though.

Jordan, did you look into the 90mm LED projector assemblies from jw speaker at all? I'd be curious on the price difference, although I think it's hard to get 90mm units in Z's housing.

 

Sit down before you read the price on those model 90 LED units.

$312...EACH

Thanks for the explanation on the reflectors guys, that does actually make sense to me.

 

So I obtained a set of these globes and have to say I'm disappointed with them.

On the positive, I found the colour temp to look great. Didn't drive in the wet to compare properly but they do look nicer from the outside looking in which is aesthetic rather than function.

On the negative side:
1/ The light beam does not project as far as my halogens. The photos below do not accurately show the difference as much as the eye sees it, but the intensity of light even at the fence - which is 7-8 metres away - is very noticeably duller. Which results in less light projection distance.

2/ The LED globe seems to light the ground up to 8m from the headlights much brighter than halogens, but this is pretty much useless because if I wanted this range lit up I'd just turn the foggies on.

3/ My main issue with the LED globe is that it seems to suffer from dramatic light drop off outside the 'beam' area - it's either really lit, or really not, whereas halogens have progressive drop off which is better for lighting up the entire forward environment. The LED's are almost a spot light. A clear example of this can be easily seen by the different amounts that the wooden garden bed boards just to the right of the LED globe beam pattern on the fence are lit up in the 2 pictures below.

Picture 1 is both halogens installed:


Picture 2 is halogen in left, LED globe in right:


* Note: Both photos taken with Canon 5d Mark 3 & 24-105 F4 L Lens.

So in summary, nice colour light, but the light output is absolutely not as good as halogens (unless you're using terrible halogens).

 

Oh wow, was expecting that to be more like the pair price.

Col, what halogen bulbs are you using? Guessing they're not 55W?