kurek
Senior Member
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2019
- Posts
- 2,498
- Reaction score
- 3,440
- Location
- Northwest
- Ram Year
- 2015
- Engine
- Hemi 5.7
Some weeks ago I took my Ram out to a local piece of public land where I could hover a drone and take night time photos of headlight beam patterns to attempt to put some objectivity into the conversation about lighting technology.
Frankly the lighting thing gets dumb, like oil and tire arguments where everyone has tied their ego to a certain brand and we're no longer talking facts just feelings.
So here's a quick photo I took from above my Ram with just the low beam headlights on, and at the same time a random car was driving by on the road. I don't think it's apples/apples exactly because that car was in motion but unless somebody wants to sponsor me to go recruit random people to park out in the snow with me this is what you get
Here is where it might get more interesting - although this isn't on a Ram I think it still is useful information.
My other car is a 2015 Jeep Patriot. I went to the same location (now muddy instead of snowy) and this time I brought the factory Sylvania headlight bulbs, a set of the same $23 incandescent bulbs that are in my Ram (Wagner ND) and a set of the most highly recommended, newest generation LEDs I could track down for my Jeep - specifically these are 2020 Hikari Megatron LEDs.
I know people wanna bicker on LEDs.. and bicker and bicker and bicker.. save it for Bingo night. I deliberately sought out the latest generation of the most recommended ones I could find for that vehicle, participating in forums like this one - cost no object - and then I pulled the trigger. I'm just some dude on the internet and I believe I did get the best possible drop-in LED assemblies for that application and if you disagree, well I can't stop you.
I set the camera on the drone to manual mode so it would not adjust exposure on its own, set it to hover at the maximum altitude I could fly there and let it just sit and hover while I swapped out 3 sets of lights. Thankfully swapping bulbs on the Jeep is way easier than on the Ram, this wouldn't have been possible on a single drone battery with the Ram!
Then I took the photos home and strictly adjusted the color down to black and white, to eliminate personal bias from the equation. No other color or brightness adjustments so it would purely reflect the differences in the lighting that the different bulbs produced.
So first here's all three bulbs, top row is high beams and second row is low beams.
Next here is an image where I have split the two better performing bulbs left/right, and mirrored the passenger side to the left. In other words, both halves of this image are of the passenger side but I flipped one of them to put next to the other, to eliminate the effect of the terrain ahead of the vehicle since the terrain is unequal.
I also selected a couple stripes from the overall beam pattern to call attention to specific differences in detail revealed by either bulb type. There is a small legend by each one with a green rectangle to identify where in the beam pattern those stripes were taken.
In addition to what you can see in the photos I have some subjective opinions on the experience but I'll keep those to myself so nobody gets their feelings hurt
Frankly the lighting thing gets dumb, like oil and tire arguments where everyone has tied their ego to a certain brand and we're no longer talking facts just feelings.
So here's a quick photo I took from above my Ram with just the low beam headlights on, and at the same time a random car was driving by on the road. I don't think it's apples/apples exactly because that car was in motion but unless somebody wants to sponsor me to go recruit random people to park out in the snow with me this is what you get
Here is where it might get more interesting - although this isn't on a Ram I think it still is useful information.
My other car is a 2015 Jeep Patriot. I went to the same location (now muddy instead of snowy) and this time I brought the factory Sylvania headlight bulbs, a set of the same $23 incandescent bulbs that are in my Ram (Wagner ND) and a set of the most highly recommended, newest generation LEDs I could track down for my Jeep - specifically these are 2020 Hikari Megatron LEDs.
I know people wanna bicker on LEDs.. and bicker and bicker and bicker.. save it for Bingo night. I deliberately sought out the latest generation of the most recommended ones I could find for that vehicle, participating in forums like this one - cost no object - and then I pulled the trigger. I'm just some dude on the internet and I believe I did get the best possible drop-in LED assemblies for that application and if you disagree, well I can't stop you.
I set the camera on the drone to manual mode so it would not adjust exposure on its own, set it to hover at the maximum altitude I could fly there and let it just sit and hover while I swapped out 3 sets of lights. Thankfully swapping bulbs on the Jeep is way easier than on the Ram, this wouldn't have been possible on a single drone battery with the Ram!
Then I took the photos home and strictly adjusted the color down to black and white, to eliminate personal bias from the equation. No other color or brightness adjustments so it would purely reflect the differences in the lighting that the different bulbs produced.
So first here's all three bulbs, top row is high beams and second row is low beams.
Next here is an image where I have split the two better performing bulbs left/right, and mirrored the passenger side to the left. In other words, both halves of this image are of the passenger side but I flipped one of them to put next to the other, to eliminate the effect of the terrain ahead of the vehicle since the terrain is unequal.
I also selected a couple stripes from the overall beam pattern to call attention to specific differences in detail revealed by either bulb type. There is a small legend by each one with a green rectangle to identify where in the beam pattern those stripes were taken.
In addition to what you can see in the photos I have some subjective opinions on the experience but I'll keep those to myself so nobody gets their feelings hurt