New lighting technology

…if you want to piss away major money on headlite-shaped trinkets from the People's Republic of Ha Ha Very Funny, yes. If you want legitimate headlamps, no.

This is what I mean when I say there's a mountain of garbage on the market. Context clues help winnow it down; legitimate suppliers usually don't do that Chinese thing of applying random-azz words grabbed out the English dictionary to themselves (such as "Dapper").



Oh, I'm sure they are. Problem is, what we feel like we're seeing isn't what we're actually seeing. The human visual system is a lousy judge of how well it's doing. "I know what I can see!" seems reasonable, but it doesn't square up with reality because we humans are just not well equipped to accurately evaluate how well or poorly we can see (or how well a headlamp works). Our subjective impressions tend to be very far out of line with objective, real measurements of how well we can (or can't) see. The primary factor that drives subjective ratings of headlamps is foreground light, that is light on the road surface close to the vehicle…which is almost irrelevant; it barely even makes it onto the _bottom_ of the list of factors that determine a headlamp's actual safety performance. A moderate amount of foreground light is necessary so we can use our peripheral vision to keep track of the lane lines and keep our focus up the road where it should be, but too much foreground light works against us: it draws our gaze downward even if we consciously try to keep looking far ahead, and the bright pool of light causes our pupils to constrict, which destroys our distance vision. All of this while creating the feeling that we've got "good" lights. It's not because we're lying to ourselves or fooling ourselves or anything like that, it's because our visual systems just don't work the way it feels like they work.

The upshot of this is that most internet "reviews" of a headlamp are useless at best, and that would still be the case even if we ignore the bogus criteria people often use when "reviewing" headlamps: sharp cutoff on low beam! (also very low on the list of factors that determine a headlamp's actual safety performance, but it looks nifty on the garage wall), "H4" (there are at least as many bad H4 headlamps as good ones), "E-code" (irrelevant; both the US and the UN/"E-code" headlamp standards have lots of room for good and bad headlamps) "High color temperature" (irrelevant at best)…and so on.



Photographs are useless here, unless the purpose is to make a cash register ring. They're misleading even if the photographer has the best of intent. That's because photographic imaging systems (pixels or film) work in a fundamentally different way than human eyes, and have a much narrower dynamic range. Even a photographer who tries very hard to keep all the camera settings identical when photographing different beams on a road or up against a wall cannot present more than broadly general information about the beams, and then only by comparison (a sharper cutoff vs. a fuzzier one, for example, or a wider beam vs. a narrower one).

Fortunately there are enough good, legitimate LED headlamps to fit our cars that we don't have to piss away major money on pretend-headlites.

Ok, what are the good, legitimate LED headlamp brands then? That don't look super weird like Truck-Lites, those are ugly for a classic car...

Not saying I still want them but from watching the demo videos it looks like an American company, the About Us page says they custom-assemble every headlight in the USA...