Truck lite phase 7 LED headlight

Engineering and building a good headlamp of any type is a whole hell of a lot more expensive than most people realise. That's why there are so many lousy headlamps on the market, mostly made in India or China with grossly inadequate (or "zero") real engineering in them, and why almost all the really good ones cost a lot of money -- especially when the price is viewed from the perspective of being accustomed to paying $9 for a sealed beam.

There's a growing number of LED 7" round headlamps on the market, and they range in quality and performance from pathetic to excellent. The 701C from Peterson is good. The Truck-Lite unit is good, though it doesn't give a very smooth beam pattern. By a big, big margin, the king daddy of them all is the 8700 Evolution 2 from JW Speaker in chrome or black. Any of these utterly trounces the objective, real, measurable safety performance you can get from a halogen headlamp of any kind, and they're all made in America. But they're all spendy.

There are no good sealed beams generally available on today's market—there's no money in sealed beams any more, so just about all of them are sloppily made on worn-out tooling that should have been scrapped and replaced years ago (or, as in the case of Wagner, bought from Eiko who sloppily makes them on new but shìtty tooling in China). There's one line of sealed beams (GE Night Hawk) that's the least-bad of the bunch. Everything from Sylvania and Wagner is godawful. There's one very difficult-to-get, very expensive 7" round halogen sealed beam by Koito that is a serious whack over the head to drive with at night: Oh! So that's how well the sealed beam headlamp system was supposed to work!

Pathetic H4s are all over the place and are unsafe. Good H4s are relatively scarce and are passably decent in terms of safety performance. A good H4 headlamp (Cibie or Koito) with a good H4 bulb (Philips Xtreme Vision or Osram 70/65w) fed with good wiring and relays -- and aimed correctly is a good, affordable, cost-effective way to go for those who can't or won't spend money on super-premium headlamps.