led reflector headlight

How to identify the headlight beam quality?

The problem we have in beam quality

Why we need to focus on headlight beam pattern quality? Nowadays, more and more people replace their vehicles’ original halogen bulbs by LED headlight bulbs. Because halogen bulb is too dimmer, especially for somewhere without road lighting, such as high way and village road. People can’t see the road clearly with halogen bulb, and LED headlight is much brighter.

After replacement, we can feel our vehicles got a signature improvement in brightness. However, we can see there are a lot of different comments to LED headlight kits in website. Some people say LED headlight kits’ light is not concentrated, so that the road still looks very dimmer. The more dangerous thing is LED headlight kits will cause scatter light, blind the opposite drivers’ eyes temporarily. This is very risky for driving safety.

Vehicle Dazzling Light To Driver
Dazzling light is very dangerious for driving safety

Why? And How it happens? Actually, it’s possible to develop perfect beam pattern LED headlight bulb. The problem consumers faced is just because most LED headlight factories are not professional. They made inaccurate light beam angle design for their LED headlight kit.

The next step we are going to make some tests and comparison, including Halogen bulb and LED headlight bulbs. And, we share some knowledge about how to identify the headlight beam quality.

The standards of perfect beam pattern

OK, how to identify the headlight beam quality? Let us learn it from the halogen bulbs’ beam pattern, because headlight assemblies’ design is based on halogen bulb light emitting principle. The beam pattern quality has below 3 standards:

headlight beam pattern
The standardized beam pattern of Reflector with halogen bulb
  1. See if the line between dimmer and light areas is distinct and consecutive. The more the line distinct, the better the beam quality is.
  2. The left line is lower and horizontal, that can avoid to blind opposite drivers. The right line is higher, make sure you can see further distance. The whole line is similar as “V” shape, the more similar to halogen bulb beam the shape is, the better the beam quality is.
  3. The hotspot (the brightest point) is on this area. Generally, the closer to halogen bulb hotspot the LED headlight bulb hotspot is, the further the LED bulb’s light emitting distance is.

If your replaced HID or LED headlight kit can be similar as this light beam quality, then the bulb’s beam quality is pretty good. OK, here we use our Trent new TITAN 2.0 (45W) LED headlight bulb as an example to test. Firstly, we install it into low beam Reflector, and power on. See, Trent LED headlight’s light beam pattern is almost completely the same as halogen bulb. The line is distinct, the “V” shape is the same angle to halogen bulb too, and the hotspot at this area.

headlight beam pattern
The light beam pattern in Reflector of Trent TITAN 2.0 LED headlight bulb

We also test another LED headlight bulb from online shopping. As we can see, firstly this beam quality is much worse, line is very indistinct. Secondly, this “V” shape’s angle is wrong, this area is keeping to produce very scatter light, easy to dazzle the opposite persons. Thirdly, the hotspot of this LED bulb is here, very low than halogen bulb.

headlight beam pattern
Worse beam pattern quality LED headlight kit with Reflector

On the other side, most of vehicle headlight assemblies’ beam pattern is this type. But, there are still some headlight assemblies have special beam pattern. For example, like Ford Focus, this is its beam pattern with halogen bulb. If we install Trent perfect beam LED headlight kit into this assembly, then its light beam is almost the same as halogen bulb too.

Advertisment trap of beam quality

Finally, we would like to remind you, some online sellers in Amazon etc., they use their LED headlight kit to install into Projector, make advertisement videos or pictures. This is to show people how good beam quality their product is. However, this is an unreal advertisement. Because almost all LED headlight will be perfect beam if installed into Projector, the projector’s beam pattern is always very good. And projector’s beam pattern is something like this, very easy to identify. Please pay more attention, and don’t be caught in this trap.

Projector LED headlight bulb
The light performance of LED headlight bulb with Projector