Which headlight bulb is the brightest

Prices are for a pair of bulbs and are what we paid including any discounts. Alongside its two new halogen bulbs, Philips has also launched a pair of LED products that are designed to replace conventional bulbs. It recorded a percentage score of , with a much brighter and wider metre beam that had a sharp cut-off and no glare. This is a prime case of legislation not keeping up with technology. One reason for the slow pace of change is the presence of poor-quality imports.

We also tested a popular online LED bulb, but while the beam length was similar, there were significant amounts of illegal glare for oncoming drivers. Its 92 per cent beam rating was bettered by most of our halogen lamps, too. Previous performances from Twenty20, which is a range stocked by online retailer Auto Bulbs Direct, gave no indication that the Daylight would be a potential test winner.

With Megalight branding on the base plate, we suspect that this is another bulb to come out of the former GE factory in Budapest. Consistency was good, with two top-performing bulbs helping it to take the FOM test by a big margin, while it won the beam length test with a narrower lead. A shock win, but well deserved. Buy now from Auto Bulbs Direct. It takes the runner-up spot but by a narrower margin over rivals than the promised performance increase might suggest.

It topped the bright spot test, had the second-best FOM and a beam length of metres, but overall brightness saw it rank sixth in a close-run test, which denied it a debut win. Buy now from Amazon. As with most rivals here, it promises per cent more brightness and this time with a metre beam length. This makes them CANBus compatible so the chances of getting any errors is minimal. Keep in mind that these bulbs are in-fact not road legal and will not pass an MOT.

There are HID kits available right now that are very bright but still poor quality. The bulbs have been manufactured poorly meaning the light bubble is in the wrong place for the headlight. This creates light scatter and glare for other road users. Most car owners will be able to fit these kits without any issue. They are designed to be plug and play and are easy to understand how they fit in.

However with tight access to the headlights, rushed jobs and poor workmanship, sometimes they are not fitted correctly and they will end up misaligned. This again causes light scatter and glare for other road users. A common sign of this is when you see a car with one headlight brighter than the other. A reflector type headlight will need anti-glare bulbs and a projector headlight will need normal bulbs.

Putting a normal bulb in a reflector headlight can result in glare for other road users to be blinded. OE Xenon HID headlights are fitted as standard to some cars, but are often offered as an option when purchasing the car…at quite a cost!

Xenon lights work a bit differently to standard halogen bulbs and actually require two core components to work. This is essentially a power converter which takes the normal 12V DC power from your car, and fires out 23,V to ignite the second component…the bulb.

The bulb has a bubble with two electrodes inside. The high voltage creates an arc of light between these electrodes. The bubble is also filled with Xenon gas which amplifies the light making it brighter and whiter.

Standard Xenon bulbs are brighter than their halogen counterparts and the upgrade bulbs we are listing are even brighter than those! Unfortunately, the two biggest drawbacks with Xenon bulbs tends to be the price and the availability. Simply put — the technology and time it takes to build these bulbs is a lot more exhaustive than standard halogen bulbs.

Some of the bulbs, such as the D1S and D3S, also have an integrated igniter built in making the production even more expensive. Factory fitted Xenon headlights are often optional which means many people choose not to have them.

This means the demand for these bulb types is lower. With a lower demand, bulb manufacturers have not dedicated as much resource into developing upgrade options in a big way.

Philips and Osram are the ones leading the innovation in this technology by quite a distance. They are a simple, no-hassle upgrade choice and provide you with a high increase in brightness. This is a significant upgrade and well worth the money if you can afford it. You could show the standard used for comparison to be percentage higher for realistic accurate data comparison.

Need the standard to compare all products. The emphasis on safety grew, and as manufacturers included in the design of the cars such things as crumple zones and airbags, so the headlight was also included on the list of improvements for safety.

Brighter headlights were needed, making potential hazards easier to see sooner to prevent accidents. But developers also needed to ensure that with the brightness the safety of other road users, in particular oncoming traffic, was not compromised. Brightness of a headlight, although it can be measured, also has other contributing factors that give a perceived brightness. So although a beam may be scientifically brighter than the next one, it may not seem to be.

This is affected by the design of the bulb and the actual housing itself. There are various units that light intensity, or brightness, is measured in. Candlepower is one of them. The most common, and Standard International unit of measurement of brightness of a light source, is the lumen Lm. To put things into perspective, a candle emits about 12 to 13Lm.

A standard bulb used in a home sits at about Lm.