The TRUTH about LED Headlight Bulbs! WATCH BEFORE BUYING ANYTHING

chances are when shopping for LED headlight bulbs you have no idea what you're looking for and how could you right here I have hundreds of examples in this video I'm gonna show you the three most important things you need to know before you buy your next set of LED headlight bulbs I understand why you're having a tough time picking out the right LED headlight bulbs for your car or truck most people have a hard time understanding what kind of headlight housings they have let alone which LED bulbs are gonna work the best some of them have flexible heat sinks hanging off the back some of them have fans some of them don't have anything like that some of them have 20 LEDs some of them have one they're different shapes and sizes it's impossible to really know what's gonna work in your vehicle unless you've done the testing we have tested so many LED headlight bulbs that we have the best understanding of what's available in the market and what works for your vehicle about a decade ago I started the company because I was trying to find some lighting upgrades for my car there was things on the internet that said this somebody else said that they're both saying we're the best and neither of them looked even remotely alike I couldn't figure it out then I went to my local shop they said the exact same thing what we have in our store is better than what's on the Internet how could you tell a friend of mine tried something and he wasn't real impressed with the results so I took it upon myself to start buying headlight upgrades from different suppliers just out of curiosity I probably spent $3,000 on headlight upgrades for my car just so I could figure out what the heck was going on I set up a website I started doing product testing and I started offering vehicle specific lighting for different cars it took off because what I realized was everybody was in the same boat that I was they had no idea what to choose because everybody tells their own version of the story look you have to buy from headlight revolution but if you're gonna go to work every day and bring home a paycheck and spend it on lighting you deserve to know the truth about LED headlight bulbs so please before you buy your bulbs from anywhere watch this video you owe it to yourself if you're interested in better lighting nobody deserves to buy a product that doesn't perform like it was advertised before we really dive into LED headlight bulbs we got to talk about headlight housings let's start with a reflector what is a reflector headlight this reflector headlight is from a Dodge Ram we commonly use this one in our videos for different demonstration purposes because the RAM comes with three different headlight options including a reflector and a projector so it's a great option to show people the difference a reflector is engineered to point the light from the light bulb inside the housing in a different direction for each flat piece of chrome plastic on the inside the combination of all these different slats and the position of the light bulb inside the housing is what creates your beam pattern some reflects your headlights are engineered better than others for example 2000 4 5 & 6 Dodge Ram that used a nine thousand seven bulb are terrible it doesn't matter if you put a halogen bulb him hid LED the only thing that works in that scenario is a projector retrofit the Dodge Ram the Toyota Tundra and some Ford vehicles have really nice beam patterns right out of the box so getting the right LED headlight bulb in some different reflector housings can produce a stunning beam pattern that's effective and doesn't blind other drivers the way the reflector headlight works is on the back side you have an opening and that opening is for a halogen light bulb the halogen light bulb has a couple pins coming off the connector on the back side which are positive and negative and they go through into the glass portion of the bulb where there's a wire wound filament when your headlight circuit is turned on the filament glows to incandescent giving it the name an incandescent light bulb the problem with using an LED bulb replacement for this type of product is if they're not made the right way you're gonna scatter light all over the place the reflector headlight relies on the light source coming from something in the exact same position as this filament in the exact same size and the exact same light output style if you put in your halogen bulb it's going to exist in just the right spot inside that housing if you take for example an LED bulb with three four or five sides now you're gonna have five times the light sources and that's going to create essentially five times the amount of beam patterns that might sound cool but what you end up with is a really strange looking unusable beam pattern with a lot of shadows and multiple dim hotspots for the Dodge Ram you can also get this projector headlight it looks pretty similar but because it doesn't rely on every surface inside the headlight housing to be a reflective surface sometimes they paint in black for style the projector is characterized by this large glass circle what it does is it refracts and focuses the light from your light bulb they use the same kind of light bulb sometimes you can get a halogen incandescent light bulb projector just like the bulb from the other headlight or sometimes HID or LED I've got a headlight just like this one but it's already taken apart what you end up with inside the headlight housing is sometimes a separate reflector for high beam and then your projector for the low beam on the back side of the housing your bulbs mount just like they would on a regular headlight but the projector has this big bowl on the backside in a reflector the bulb sticks inside the bowl here on the projector the bowl is on the back side and then all the light bounces off the smooth surface inside the projector bowl and gets focused outside of this projector the reason I'm explaining this to you is some people will say well this LED bulb worked really good for me and that might be the case for the reflector but then when you put it in the projector headlight the technology is different one LED headlight bulb that works in a reflector might not work in a projector it's very important that you find out which bulbs work well in a projector and which ones don't if an LED headlight bulb works well in a projector like this one chances are it'll probably work good in a reflector like the first one I showed you but oftentimes that's not the case the other way around some companies even go so far as to make a projector specific LED headlight bulb sometimes they work sometimes they don't we go above and beyond as often as possible to get a vehicle in here physically and do the testing on all kinds of different LED headlight bulbs you might find on our website that we mostly sell the same two three or four brands of bulbs all the time and think well they're just trying to sell those because they make the most money on them the way we operate here at headlight revolution is we get everything there's only one reason to have this many light bulbs and that's to find out which ones are the best so we don't just sell the one bulb that makes us the most profit we sell the bulbs that we find work the best in each application we believe that everybody who wants better headlights should get it and if all we did was sell one brand of product maybe our house brand a product and never offered anything else I don't think that we'd be doing you a service if somebody else's light bulbs are doing better those are the ones that we recommend the challenge with different LED bulbs working better or worse in the same vehicle or different vehicles is you still don't know which one to buy so we're going to talk about what makes them different how to tell a good LED headlight bulb apart from a bad one and then please go check out our other videos we have a shoot out video we have different review and comparisons and we have vehicle-specific videos where we show you out of everything that's out there which one works the best on a Ford truck or a Chevy truck or a ram or a tundra or a 4runner Jeep Hummer we have all kinds of vehicle specific testing so go check it out and if you like what you see so far please subscribe we have dozens of headlight housings in stock from the vehicles that you drive and we have hundreds of LED headlight bulbs in stock we do this because we want to be the best we want to know what everything is it's available and when you call us we want to make sure that we are the headlight experts at headlight revolution it's our mission to discover the world's best automotive lighting products and educate people so they know what they're getting we really do care about which products we offer and recommend in just a second I'm going to show you some really bizarre LED headlight bulbs because with this many trust me there's some strange stuff but first you need to understand the different types of bulbs and how to choose the right type you have about a dozen or fifteen different headlight bulb styles and fog light you've got nine thousand five nine thousand six nine thousand four nine thousand seven h-11 h 13 h 1 h 3 h 16 5202 2504 and if you don't get the right LED bulb for the right bulb you have already it's not gonna fit here's an example this is an h13 halogen bulb this is called a dual beam bulb because one bulb does dual beams this bulb has two filaments inside so you can't get an LED that has just one row of LEDs you need something with to let me find an H 13 LED headlight bulb here's an example right here you can tell that they're the same because they've got the same mounting collar they've got the same mounting tabs the incandescent halogen bulb has two filaments and the LED has two arrays of LEDs that mimic the two filaments and lastly they've got the connector with 3 pins ground high beam and low beam same with an h4 if you don't select h4 to replace your h4 halogen bulb it's not gonna work here's an h4 LED you can see it's got the same mounting tabs the same collar the h4 has three tab wire connections just like the LED bulb has if you buy an h3 or an h1 it's not gonna work h4 goes to h4 and you can see on this h4 it has two LEDs ones designed to be low beam and ones designed to be high beam just like this h4 halogen bulb has two filaments now if you have a single beam like a older Toyota Tundra or some of the Dodge Ram vehicles you have a single beam single beam simply means one beam per bulb in this case you might have one headlight just for low beam and another headlight just for high beam these look similar at first glance but when you get up close they're actually very different notice the very tips they both have a point in the glass at the top one of them is covered in paint the other is not one of them has a large red O ring below metal mounting tabs the other one has a small red O ring above plastic mounting tabs even the wire connectors look similar but they're different on one the connectors have pins inside that are further apart you have to know which bulbs you need go to one of the popular bulb lookups online you might make you might see nine thousand five or nine thousand six then when you're going for LED bulbs find the corresponding nine thousand five and nine thousand six bulbs just like there's different dual beam bulbs there's also different single beam bulbs if you have a single beam h-11 you have to find an H 11 LED bulb replacement I promised I'd show you something odd and something you probably seen before so check this thing out I'm not kidding this little stick is an LED headlight bulb it has the same mounting colors as the h-11 it's got the same bow ring as the h-11 and the wire connector is almost identical to the h-11 wire connector do you think it worked well I'll let you guess no no it did not this one was terrible and I was really disappointed because it's pretty cool now that you understand the basics of lighting technology let's go and talk about a few different LED bulb styles so that you can pick the right one for your next project the first thing I want to point out our little LED bulbs that look like the original bulbs but they don't have a driver or a heatsink I'm talking about something like this here it has the same plastic base connector as your original halogen bulb and it has some type of LEDs there's a thousand different styles out there but the LEDs that are used in this particular bulb are good for a daytime running light it's not going to be a bright daytime running light or this style of LED could be used as a reverse light or a turn signal light this is not a headlight bulb this halogen headlight bulb might produce a thousand lumens of light this little LED bulb that looks like a headlight bulb to be lucky to get a hundred lumens out of it now not to be confused with a newer generation of LED headlight bulbs that are starting to come to the market right now I'm talking about ones like this this is the supernova perfect fit and it actually has a heatsink what this should indicate to you is that there's a little more going on inside here than just an LED that looks like a headlight you also see the top half looks very similar to some of the more popular LED bulbs out there something else you want to look out for when choosing LEDs is the type of chip that's used here's one with some kind of chip on board here's a three sided chip on board those are no good another one here and here's another one right in front of me this type of LED that just looks like a big yellow block is called chip on board also referred to as Co B the chip on board LED technology isn't very heat resistant it burns out pretty easily so when they push these as hard as they have to to create enough light to be used as a headlight they fail secondly they're not very bright as it is they don't have a whole lot of efficiency so a larger LED using more power won't create as much light as a more modern headlight bulb lastly the footprint is way too big I mean just take a look at this compared to its halogen counterpart as you can see they have the same oring this round red colored rubber piece below the mounting tabs the wire connections are the same this big LED bulb is designed to replace this halogen bulb look at how massive the contact surface is where these LEDs are this is going to create a big glob of light the headlight housing is designed for a precise little tiny filament when you're looking for bulbs that's the goal the next type of LED technology are the more traditional SMD or very similar to like the cree xhp bulbs here's one version here's another that we've tested and here's one more for good measure these type of LEDs are actually a square LED you can see at this middle one that there's a big round piece of silicon over it that doesn't mean that it's a round LED that's actually a type of optic applied to the LED chip but this square light output this big square light source doesn't do a good job at mimicking the original incandescent filament in your halogen light bulb so what you end up with is potentially a lot of brightness but the beam pattern suffers you end up with a floodlight instead of a horizontal beam with a cut off pattern everybody who's selling LED headlights is moving away from this style in general the last kind of LED technology I want to show you to stay away from our color changing LED bulbs and let me show you why all of these are the same type of bulb you can tell because they've got the same oring characteristic now we have a lot of the same type of bulb so that we can test them all all different brands on the same headlight housing so you might get a bulb that looks different than this depending on your application now all three of these are dual color they've got one set of LEDs that is a cool white collar like 6000k white and another set of LEDs that's an amber or gold color and generally the way they work is you turn them on and they're one color you cycle the power which means turn them off and back on again and it goes to the other color so first of all talk about a nuisance right if you have to keep flipping your lights on and off every single time you want to drive the vehicle you're gonna constantly have a different color fog light or headlight maybe you're into that it would drive me crazy what if they get on different sequences and one time you turn on your lights this one's white and this one's yellow and the next time they flip-flop you got to unplug them and restart the whole thing a lot of people also spend a lot of time focusing on the heatsink of the LED bulbs back in the day it was common knowledge that you'd use an LED because it doesn't create a whole lot of power that was before they use them for headlights now they have to push them so hard that the efficiency moves beyond just light and creates a lot of heat it's really my opinion that the heatsink is important but not the whole picture you have three main types of heat sinks we're gonna talk about the flexible braided the passive non flexible heat sinks and then the fan based heat sinks putco has a couple different types of flexible heat sinks like this one that has this copper braided mesh and it's attached inside the headlight bulb to the center conductor that brings the heat from the LED to the heatsink and then it creates surface area because you can spread these heat sinks fan them out and give place for air to flow this allows for more cooling than normal without the use of moving parts it also gives you more surface area than a non flexible heat think in a more convenient package you can install this and move these heat sinks wherever you want and it'll fit in almost any application you also have different types of LED headlight bulbs with semi flexible or rigid bendable heat sinks like this one putco also has the f1 like this where the heat things come out the side and you get to mess with them and bend them and put them however you want it's a different way of achieving the same thing when we test LED headlight bulb temperatures we find that the fan based bulbs run the coolest the flexible braided type of LED bleh bulbs are second and the non flexible metal passive bulbs are third what we've also found is that even though flexible heat sinks work really well we see a lot of good output from non flexible and fan based bulbs and vice-versa we found good contenders in all three types of heat sink categories a lot of times the heat sink design is more of a fitment thing than a performance thing when I say non-flexible passive heat sink I mean it's not flexible and it doesn't move you look at something like this bulb here from Oracle Lighting it has a big metal heatsink on the bottom with slots to create your surface area and there's no fan and there's nothing flexible it relies on the connection internally from the LED down to the base of the heatsink and all of these different openings in the heatsink to release the heat when we talk about a fan base bulb it's very similar to these non flexible bulbs but there's a fan built inside if we take a look at the diode dynamics sl1 you see the heatsink is shaped in a longer pattern with a plastic cover that holds a fan the fan blows air on the heatsink to speed up the cooling process you've got something like this one from CLD car lighting district and the fan is directly on the bottom encased in the metal housing you've got ones like this from night eye where the fan is encase in the middle housing but sideways this is very similar to the Morimoto two-stroke 1.0 you have a lot of fans that are completely exposed on the bottom and you might think well that's going to cause problems and they're gonna stop working well no more so than a flexible heatsink that gets caked with mud or dirt over time or a passive heatsink that gets rusty or gets caked with mud and dirt they all have their upsides and downsides the fans work and generally when we sell a bulb with a fan type heatsink a flexible braided heatsink or passive heatsink we don't see it fail because the problem with the heat sink fan or no fan generally it's an overall component issue a defective driver or a poor quality LED chip my number one recommendation for buying an LED headlight bulb you waited for it I told you everything you shouldn't do this is what to actually look for if you see the warning signs the other ones stay away when you're actually shopping the goal I've said it a hundred times mimic the light output of the original incandescent bulb because that's what the headlight was designed for so we look at the putco f1 if you look at the actual circuit board it's super super super close together and then the LED chip technology is vertically aligned just like the halogen and it should be in the same place - in the headlight this should create the right beam pattern beam pattern is key if we can't recreate the original beam pattern you don't get any brightness the diode dynamics sl1 is the same way they use one PCB it's absolutely tiny and in three CSP LEDs on each side it perfectly mimics the shape and position of the incandescent light bulb and it's super super thin that's the key you look at the supernova v4 it uses flip chip technology but it's the same thing inside this big aluminum casing if you actually look down there at the PCB that's the circuit board that the LEDs are mounted on it's really really thin we're trying to get as close to back-to-back as possible because we want to mimic this shape the perfect fit bulbs same story these uses the Philips zes CSP chip and they're in the same spot as the original halogen as soon as you get something like this with a big old bump stay away the same thing goes for the gt-r lighting ultra series headlight they have long since been a crowd favorite because they've got that Philips zes LED chip that's super super thin so it perfectly mimics the original bulb filament it has the reflectors around the bulb and they've got a waterproof connector with a small driver this one outperforms a lot of bulbs that look almost identical to it if you take for example this bulb very similar LED chip array three small CSP chips the gt-r lighting bulb outperforms it the other great thing about getting this type of LED that I'm talking about the Philips Luxy on zes CSP flip-chip Cree all these different LED technologies are high quality which means you get higher heat resistance and you get a higher CRI the color render index so when you buy a 6000 k is actually a 6000k not a seven or a green all of these things come into play when making the best LED headlight bulbs and that's why we don't just sell one we test it all and we tell you what we find I know that was a ton of information probably more than they're used to seeing in one video on YouTube but I hope it was worth it I hope you learned something actually I hope you learned a lot you keep doing what you're doing go to your job enjoy your vehicle upgrade it you got to do those lighting upgrades and we'll be here doing ours we're gonna continue investigating the wild world of LED headlights and bringing it to you so you can make the best decisions thank you so much for watching I'm glad you could be here please subscribe so you don't miss our next videos and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Headlight Revolution

Views: 1,373,115

Rating: 4.7589746 out of 5

Keywords: LED, Lighting, gtr lighting, supernova, perfectfit, perfect, fit, fan, heat sink, flexible, braided, putco, diode dynamics, morimoto, led concepts, profile, oracle, vleds, micro, evolution, auxbeam, opt7, vehicode, cld, car lighting district, brightest, safest, dot, approved, waterproof, reliable, cheapest, best, headlight revolution, led headlights, headlight upgrade, led headlight bulbs

Id: DeaDrH0gXZk

Length: 27min 40sec (1660 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/cr0ft]

In case someone is considering messing with their headlights... it's literally illegal (technically speaking) to put anything but halogens in a halogen reflector but if you're going to do it, at least get informed and get LED's that mimic the Halogen bulb so well that it doesn't blind on coming traffic. Because you can definitely see good gains for the amount of light you have on the road with modern LED bulbs.

[u/Doriswisdom]

Thanks for your share.I use suaoki led headlight bulbs. It works very well. Easy to install and super bright