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I put an OPT7 headlight kit in my stock lamp housings yesterday. Not a fan. The lights are absolutely beautiful if you don't intend to drive... being a typical LED headlight bulb, the LEDs are essentially mounted on a two-sided board, so the bulb is not omnidirectional and the reflector does a poor job focusing the light properly. I do also have the OPT7 fog lights, though, and those are staying. I'm going to pull the headlight kit out and find something else.
I put an OPT7 headlight kit in my stock lamp housings yesterday. Not a fan. The lights are absolutely beautiful if you don't intend to drive... being a typical LED headlight bulb, the LEDs are essentially mounted on a two-sided board, so the bulb is not omnidirectional and the reflector does a poor job focusing the light properly. I do also have the OPT7 fog lights, though, and those are staying. I'm going to pull the headlight kit out and find something else.
Interesting - I would have expected that they would still be brighter on the road, but as beamshots show, most light would be a hotspot directly in front of the truck rather than thrown down the road. Any picture? It would be good for people to see what the product looks like on a 2005.
I would first make sure the bulb is screwed all the way in. On my headlight housing, my hands get torn up turning the bulb hard enough to get it to lock into place (rubber seal is too thick). I've torn a few rags trying to use them as protection between my hand and the heatsink fins. May not be an issue with your specific headlight housings. In any case, the beam didn't seem to change much on my 09-2014 headlight assembly, between having it halfway turned and having it fully locked into place.
Yessir. See my original thread here. I have more pictures but they're on my phone which I don't have at work. Both lights threw the same pattern, slope and all.
Edit: The pictures were taken before elevation adjustment. Once both were in, I had to drop them both down significantly. There are two hot spots, as are visible in the pictures. The top one I adjusted to be the height of the stock bulb's hot spot. The bottom hot spot is just kind of there... from the driver's perspective, it makes the truck look like its fog lights are on.
Yessir. See my original thread here. I have more pictures but they're on my phone which I don't have at work. Both lights threw the same pattern, slope and all.
Yeah, that product does not work in that headlight assembly at all. It's hitting part of the low-beam area of the reflector, and part of the high-beam area. The product does work much better in the 09-14 headlight than that, but in both cases, it isn't differentiating between low beam, high beam, and foreground lighting. The 09-14 appear to have three areas of light, and they are simply reflector rear, reflector top, and reflector bottom.
The bottom hot spot is just kind of there... from the driver's perspective, it makes the truck look like its fog lights are on.
Yeah, that's where 1/3 of the light goes to when using the OPT7 bulb in the 09-14 headlights. Directly in front of the truck. Sorry they don't work (at all) on your truck though.
Just shows an extreme example of how a reflector is designed for a light source at a specific location. Move away from that location and the reflector won't do anything productive.
Exactly. I got these instead. They should come in tomorrow.
What bulbs do you plan on using in there?
From my research, I believe the projector in that product is similar to the projector in the 09-14 Recon/Spyder headlights. In my testing, the HID product didn't have any higher percentage of light above the cutoff to cause glare, but being brighter than halogen, more total light was above the cutoff. I wish the cutoff was better on the product, but the output is far brighter than stock, and with good throw.
The projectors do let you use 65W halogen bulbs, so there is a good 20% output increase from that alone.
I haven't decided just yet. I saw them last night and just pulled the trigger because Amazon has a good return policy. Quite honestly I'm too tired today to do a ton of research.
Here is the start of how the beamshots match up to real world illumination. I know the general mindset of people is "I'll do what I want, I don't care about you", but the next pictures of glare show exactly what drivers will see (and you will see if other drivers install similar lights). These pictures show why there are laws controlling headlights, and why a person can be ticketed, or worse, be found responsible and accountable for car wrecks that insurance will refuse to pay on the insured's behalf.
The upcoming photos were left a larger size for view of better detail. The forum sizes them down drastically, so I h ave included links for the full size images. I chose a camera exposure that seemed to provide the best illumination to match that of my eyes.
I tested all bulbs in the passenger headlight assemblies since they are readily available. A drivers side housing would cause additional glare due to their relative placement to oncoming traffic and driver-side mirrors. For direct-comparisons sake with data obtained the same day, this is a minor variable.
Here is the area where I spent about 6 hours getting photos:
The following pictures were taken in the dark with no moisture on the ground.
Below I compare 4 setups from a 2009-2014 model headlight. Headlight assemblies are factory halogen housing with halogen bulb and OPT7 bulb, and factory HID housing with stock Osram D3S bulbs. The last picture of each set shows me having adjusted the headlight downward to get the top of the OPT7 bulb's beam properly aimed.
Low beam on left, high beam on right with two cars' lights on, reproducing an environment where there is a vehicle directly in front, and a vehicle in the oncoming lane.
11-23-2015, 01:03 PM
