Is it normal to have the white xenon lights, plus what looks like old school yellow type as well? Seems a bit old fashioned for such a car , can they be replaced with a more whitish light?

do you mean the main inner lights being yellow'ish.. ... - .- -.




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The sidelights & high beam are yellower - regular bulbs

I changed my sidelight bulbs for whiter ones - just make sure they are can bus compatible

Yes the inner ones, plus the ones that come on when turning, if they can be replaced any recommendations? Thx

the mains are H7 and the cornering are H8..

both can be replaced by purchasing 'white' halogens from ebay for around £6-8 per pair or you can put led/smd bulbs in.. ... - .- -.




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The inner ones are just fill in lamps. The actual xenons do both the main beam and high beam, but the halogen is there to fill in the time it takes for the shutter to move out the way of the xenon to give you full beam.

Osram night breakers are pretty good, they're cheap from euro car parts. You can get the unbranded ones from ebay, but in my experience unbranded bulbs tend to fail pretty quickly.

Thanks Stan, maybe led is the way forward anything to watch out for given the canbus system?

Thanks Zirconblue you don't recommended LEDs?

I've used them on my mini, the problem you have it finding ones that will fit in the hole or lamp holder, i've found them in the past where they wont go far enough into the lamp holder to engage the bayonet. I've also had them where the individual LED's start flickering and failing. Some of them don't even give a very good beam pattern, because the reflector on the lamp isn't designed for them, they're not as bad as those god awful after market HID kits people fit, but the light while very bright tends to flood everywhere rather than be focused where it's supposed to go.

In principle they're good, but the quality of them is hit and miss. I think this stems from none of them technically being road legal (despite what the vendors might claim), it doesn't mean you'll have problems come MOT or you'll get pulled over for them. But because the makers don't have to comply with any spec they aren't all the same quality.
Decent quality uprated glass bulbs last years.

Zirconblue wrote:

The inner ones are just fill in lamps. The actual xenons do both the main beam and high beam, but the halogen is there to fill in the time it takes for the shutter to move out the way of the xenon to give you full beam.

Dont put LEDs in the main headlights - they won't produce a decent beam, as they can't match the charicteristics of a narrow filament. The cornering ones, probably yes (I have them in my D3's cornering lamps and the effect works).

I also agree that they are more than just an in-fill beam. The 35W xenon is roughly eqivalent to 105W in halogen terms, so at 55W, the halogens are adding an extra 50% or so, and in a narrower beam than the xenons. To add to this, the colour spectrum and temperature of halogen produces better visibility than HID or LEDs - the fact it is a bit yellow is a good thing for the human eye. Sometimes "old fashioned" is not always as bad as it seems.

You can't get halogen bulbs that will match the xenons, and the ones that get closest only do so by means of a neodymium coating, which filters out the yellow light - meaning you loose much light, and shorten bulb life as it is converted to heat.  Visiting from DISCO3.CO.UK
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Does that apply to the Osram night breakers, i always thought they gave a good light plus it was more white than yellow..

It applies a little, but not to the extent of many others. They do produce good amount of light, because they compensate by running the filament harder, hence the poor bulb life that is observed from them.

The best thing IMO is just to stick with standard halogen bulbs, and be pleased to know that the yellow glow is helping more with visibility than if it were whiter.  Visiting from DISCO3.CO.UK
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That's what I've always done

I like the side lights to match the headlights in terms of colour temperature as it looks kind of odd when you look at the car - but for the high beam, I just want as much light as possible & agree that the broader colour spectrum is a good thing.

Here's a post I wrote on the subject on Defender2:

Lost for Words wrote:

White LEDs, and HID beams, produce their light output in a very "spikey" manner - that is to say, if you visualise the colour spectrum on a graph, LEDs/HID will have only steep spikes at certain wavelengths, and emit very little light at others. The end result is still white, but you are missing colours inbetween. Halogen, on the other hand, produces a smooth output, with near 100% of colour emitted evenly, though trailing of a little at the blue end of the spectrum. LEDs are worst in this regard, with HID in-between, but this is where halogen comes into it's own.

What this means to the driver, is that while an LED/HID beam is nice and bright, things don't "pop out" as clearly.

The other aspect is colour temperature - to get the most light out of an HID beam, it needs to be at 4300k, for LEDs the most light is produced at 6000k. The disadvantage of these temperatures vs the 3XXXk of halogen, is down to the way our eyes process light. We have three kinds of vision (kind of - it's more of a scale really) - photopic (used in bright light conditions), mesopic (used in meduim light conditions) and scotopic (used in only the darkest of situations). These "modes" are as a result of the rods and cones we use to detect light in our eyes.



Rods are crude, with very little ability to distinguish colours, but they are able to process low levels of light well at the blue end of the spectrum. Cones recognise colours in great detail and we use them to see a wider spectrum, including longer wavelengths of red light, but they are poor in low light conditions. As a result of this, a higher colour temperature beam from LEDs/HID causes our eyes to adjust towards mesopic vision more readily due to the lack of red/orange/yellow light, and in doing so reducing our ability to recognise objects by colour gradients, and causing increased fatigue. This is the same reason that humans show a better ability to recognise a distinct spectrum within red-yellow, but find it harder to separate different tones of blue, and why the emergency services use blue lights.

The other factor, is that blue light refracts more on our retinas, than red or yellow, so higher temperature light generally results in more glare. It's for these reasons, than the French with their selective yellow headlights have always had better vision on poor weather conditions, and why yellow fog lights are of benefit.

The upshot is that halogen produces the best light for use by the human eye. It has low luminous efficacy (not a typo BTW), and takes more space, but given unlimited power, and space, it is the best light source. LEDs and HID come into their own when other practical reasons require it.

HTH

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