Suit yourself. I did nothing but pop them in. Brightness is excellent, pattern is correct, I don't get people flashing their lights at me, and night vision is MUCH better. Besides the FEH, I used them in my Mustang and my pickup. Very happy with them.

 

No, I'm going to try them but I had to know what I was looking at. Before I never changed the headlights because I didn't find good ones (just all others). I saw a lot of testing and many had bad beam, glare, too thick, etc. The really good ones are like $100. Some lights also appear brighter but really lower output than the halogens. This looks pretty thin and hopefully fit at 9 and 3 inside the housing. Did you see the new one they made, the shape is better but I think it's too bright.

 

Interesting. I would try the brighter ones but I don't expect to have this car more than a few months longer. I might try them in the Mustang though, Definitely would look at the pattern closer, and probably lower them slightly.

 

BTW, thanks for that alignment vid. I did not know they could be rotated.
I just walked out and checked my FEH. Both LED bulbs are correctly oriented.

 

I will check on the wall and see how mine look. before/after/1 light I wish they did 6000k instead of 6500 but at least these will last and seem to match the bulb. Looked at what the headlight revolution recommend and yea, $200+ for a light is a bit much. These have 2mm spacing so it should be like the expensive light. Your pattern was really close to the wall so can't see edges and if the slight reflection above the line was anything, etc. The other thing they said to watch out for was bright spotting which would lower visibility. My halogens are original LL so really really weak.

This guy's video was the most question raising:

 

OK I have to chime in here with an opinion. I believe in personal freedom and individual liberty very strongly, and it's your money and your car. And I think replacing a lot of the bulbs with LEDs is a fine idea. But yesterday I was on a 2-lane road at dusk and someone in the oncoming lane was sitting off to the side of the road, in the shoulder, in a Mercedes with *obvious* LED headlights. The car was slightly turned in such a way that the headlights were pointed into the other lane. I don't know if they were on high beam or not, but they were *blindingly bright* even at dusk, while it was still fairly well-lit outside. Even painfully bright. I crested a hill and thought the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind was in front of me, and I could not see for a couple of seconds at 50 MPH. It took a few more seconds to get out of the beam and when I passed this car it was some kind of convertible with an absolutely HUGE three pointed star in the grille, about 8" in diameter, clearly an accessory aftermarket "bling" grille. So this dude/dudette was proud they had a Mercedes with blindingly bright lights.

If you do them on your car, please at least have the decency and respect for your fellow drivers to aim them properly and pay attention to the cutoff and beam pattern. I live in a semirural area with a lot of hills and "blind" corners and people driving around those corners at night are bad enough leaving their conventional halogen high-beams on. It's really dangerous because - especially for older people - losing a few seconds of seeing the road going around a corner and having their eyes have to dark adjust like they were just blinded by a tactical flashlight is really painful and disorienting. They're just as annoying as the downhome 'country homeboys with their diesel rigs with open exhausts that are loud enough to wake up everything in a 500 yard radius in the middle of the night.

Nobody owns the road, we have to share it. It's almost like we're in an arms race to see who can fit new headlights bright enough to burn the paint off the car in front of them. Everybody wanna be a playa. This Mercedes had headlights so bright you could see them from the next zipcode. I'll bet it had 4,000 watts of subwoofers to match, but I'm glad I didn't stop to have any more of my sensors knocked offline.</rant>

 

Indeed. Don't want to blind people nor get pulled over. The stock lights are ~350 lux and these are 800lux so only 2x as bright at best. I also found out my reflector has a cap on the bulb and it's not just an open ended one like perhaps the 07 and below or F150s. I'll try to get pics of the pattern up here so people can make up their own minds. Many just slap the brightest bulb they can find and go with that. If the LEDs don't work out I'll buy some better halogen.

 

Thanks, and I'm also aware of the woes that happen because cars come from the factory with terribly dim headlights that were borderline dangerous the other way - too much dimbulb caution/regulation. On the '87 Audi 5000CS Turbo Quattro I owned a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (Chicago), in addition to the "born to melt" overloaded and under-gauge factory wiring, the headlights/beams and pattern - even on high beam - were best described as "telling a dirty joke while holding a candle in the dark." This was due to all kinds of factors, and a long story. Bottom line: they sucked bigly, and one of the popular alternatives was to buy the european units and upgrade the wiring with new connectors, relays and so forth, wired off the existing circuitry but better quality wiring. Anyone who wanted to drive that car at 80-110 MPH especially (at which speeds it was a tremendously fun, competent and comfortable car, even in the rain, and also got good mileage at those speeds with its ~2.2L turbo inline 5) bought them as a matter of basic safety. I did, and I wired them up and they were great. Sometimes eagle-eyed state inspectors would fail you - if they scrutinized the headlights closely - so you always had to keep the originals to swap back in for inspection purposes if you got flunked. How bright were they? I think tame by today's "Blam! Pow!" metrics. They were 55W low beam/60W high beam (with another 55w center driving light) and I don't think they were close to some of these new monster LED units in terms of lumens. I'm amazed the following page still exists:

http://www.sjmautotechnik.com/troubl.../eurolght.html

So yeah, in other words, there's really such a thing as: "nowhere near enough...not enough...enough...too much...way too much."

 

So the lights showed up.

Original Pattern

Side By SIde

Full

Intensity


Turning these lights out was actually a challenge. I think I have original bulbs. I needed to apply tools to get them to come out and go back in.

Pros:
Brighter.
Cover the area better.
Good pattern. Not much turbulence or out of focus issues like I've seen online.
White light looks natural to this car, it's not too blue.
Not too intense, I can look into the headlights.
Supposedly 30w vs 55w per original light
Stay below the horizon straight ahead.

Cons:
The white color vs 3500k or whatever is a little odd. There is something to be said about color vs visibility. At least these aren't 150 lux like some competitor/ebay lights.
They get warm just like the halogen.
Not sure how rain/snow performance will be.
Don't match fog lights and the other lights are a joke now.

WTF:
Passenger side has very limited side spill. Only some out of focus ripple towards the back.
Driver's side has a 175 degree spill in a weird spot. I am lighting up trees and signs in a 6" literal beam. It's only visible absent streetlights. And I tried to see if it was blinding but it wasn't. Still, it's there.


I also drove around, even passed cops. Nobody flashed their lights at me. Noticed a lot more people have white headlights now. Sometimes much brighter than mine and worse aligned. What weirds me out is that horizontal side spill. It's perfect to light up addresses and even signs but it's literally like a crack. Don't know if something is wrong with the reflector or if I should put the bulb upside down, etc. Perhaps it is a feature of the reflector but now the light is more intense? It doesn't happen on the passenger side and it's away from traffic.




Above is my crude MSpaint interpretation of it. Tonight I will investigate further and see wtf is going on. Again, only visible when on a completely dark road, coincidentally nobody flashed me there either. Ever seen something like that?

 

I swapped the lights around. It's not the light, it's the reflector.