Testing LED bulbs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQF5ESBHLrwdifferent styles of LED chips and heatsinks, including latest Philips chips
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sonh4lHu4XEboth pretty long videos but well worth a look as they can save you making costly mistake.
The only 'downside' of LED bulbs seems to be that because they do not produce infra-red in the huge quantities that incandescent bulbs do (wasted power) they will not melt ice and snow off the headlamp cover, but by the same token will not bake on the winter salt and also will not degrade the plastic of headlight and lens. Because of increased efficiency of LED the saving in power is huge, instead of 5 amps per bulb for filament type, LED only draw about 1 amp.
Remember when presenter talks about heat-sink temperatures he is American and using Fahrenheit scale, so you can basically divide his temperature figure by 2 for Celsius.
The ones with the best beam patterns seem to use the Philips Luxeon Z-ES or Ultinon LED packs, which have a narrow group of small square LED chips (3 or 4 each side) running lengthwise down the bulb (same direction as the filament does) - the worst beam patterns are single bulbous Cree LEDs or round / square LED arrays (COB style).
I have just fitted a pair of H4 LED bulbs from classiccarleds.com to her indoors Jazz GE today (bulbs are beautifully well made, with Phillips xtreme Ultinon chips - colour 6000K and claimed 3000lumen per bulb, and as the LED strips are exactly same length and position as filaments in a bulb the beams should be legal, unlike an HID bulb in a reflector designed for filament bulb, and connectors are top notch) , will try to post photos of beam pattern, but will have to wait till it gets dark tonight. Beam certainly looks nice and flat and tilted towards nearside (but garage door is white and sun is on it all afternoon, so no good for pictures yet) - there is a dial on the bulb between the mounting and the body of bulb which you can twist - they recommend position 6 for LHD and 8 for RHD vehicles as a starter, they came set on 8 anyway. Bulbs don't have a fan, just a screw-on passive heatsink on the back, plenty of room for it on GE Jazz and plenty of fresh air round it. Bulbs are £70 a pair but its nice to think I will never have to replace another headlight bulb (wish they had been around when we had GD Jazzes, those are a pig to replace). They are pure white, but will only see brightness tonight.
Apparently there are bulbs with cheap copies of Phillips LED chips on sale, attached is a picture I turned up. The real chips have the wider resistor pack and colour of yellow chip is more even. I have looked at the chips on the bulbs I bought and they look like the 'real' ones, the whole front part of the bulb looks exactly like the Philips made bulbs, even the shape of the aluminium clamps and allen screws.
http://www.ledoauto.com/blog/index.php/2017/02/21/beware-of-fake-luxeon-zes-led-headlight-big-potential-danger-to-your-car/http://www.ledoauto.com/blog/index.php/2016/09/05/dear-our-esteem-clients/[attachment deleted by admin]