Or time.
You are absolutely right – and it pushes me closer to making this very practical modification.
So tempting….
It’s cheap enough and easy enough that it’s worth it IMO. Even if you only have the car for a year or two, I think it’s worth it. We have had our 21st tour about 1.5 years now. We tend to keep our cars for 8-10 years. But if they do make a Desert Ascent, I’ll likely trade it depending on the interior options. I will have to change a few things like our Diode Dynamics SSE Pro (Selective Yellow) fog lights and the wheels, but it’s not a big deal. I’ll just redo this mod if it happens and remove the OEM wireless charger. We don’t use it as often as we do and it takes up quite a bit of space in that cubby.
Thanks for explaining this elegantly, just lazily blanking it out in “I don’t like cold light”. I prefer the warm range and have gone through the trouble of making sure all the LEDs in my house are in the 3k range. I guess I just can’t get over the fact that I’ve been looking at incandescent light in that range my whole life.
No problem!! You will notice that many of my posts/replies are quite long. I have a hard time summarizing my thoughts and like to give a WHY to my edit or topic being discussed. I don’t like posts that say “this is amazing” without context, it’s not helpful at all and the pictures can be misleading. Another reason is because I try not to assume that everyone is mechanically inclined or educated on the subject. I have been an auto and aircraft mechanic for over 20 years professionally, so these things come easy to me. But that’s what makes forums great, lots of different backgrounds all coming together to help each other.
I also like the warmer lighting versus the cooler. I really like the GE Relax HD (high definition) LED bulbs from Lowes for our house as they are 2700K and 90 CRI, more on CRI in the third answer. They are great living areas and bedrooms where a bright white is not really desired most of the time. Kitchens and Baths I like the GE Reveal HD bulbs, they are also 2700K but they look a little white. Although the CRI is not that high, they do some tricks with the LED output and it makes the colors very realistic and helps you with kitchen tasks and whatever you do in the bathroom mirror. Llol Plus GE are very reasonably priced, look like a regular bulb and are glass so it looks normal and the output is actually 360 degrees compared to other bulbs that only have 1/2 the bulb off. I just noticed a new one that they have also called “full of sun”. They look like they would be great!! According to GE, they’re 5000K and 98 CRI, plus they claim to filter out blue wavelengths to ensure your sleep cycle isn’t disrupted. I will have to try some!
If you’re curious about task lighting, you should check out Milwaukee lights. I have the 2111-21 flashlight and the 2010R pen light, both rechargeable. Battery life is excellent for both. The med flood headlamp will last all day, legitimately 8-9 hours as tested by me and that’s on a 5 year battery. The “Trueveiw” LED is about 3000K I would say, but the color accuracy is amazing! When I’m under a dash looking for light green communication wires with pink tracer 28ga canbus wire in a 40+ plus wire bundle to investigate, it should be correct. Most other LED work lights just blow out the colors and make it painful you know. As you’ve probably noticed, I’m a lighting nerd, no matter where the light is used.
Anyway…I’m going to get back on task and stop rambling endlessly about my lighting obsession. lol Here are the photos I took this morning at 0530. Sorry for the light artifacts in the first photo, must have had a smudge on the lens. Also, this is when I noticed that the trim piece wasn’t cut all the way on the driver’s side. I think this was from a recent trip to the dealer when they were diagnosing the lift gate beam/actuator failure. I put it back in place and everything is in it again. From this angle, the light frame looks like it extends in front of the accent line at the trim style line, but it doesn’t and is actually perfectly on the edge.
This is from my point of view with a height of 6 meters.
This is kind of a beauty shot from the height of the loading floor, pointing up. Here you can see that only the cargo lights are on with no other interior lights on.
This is absolutely true!! Both are important in their own way depending on the purpose and preferences. I think CRI is more important overall, but too high of a Kelvin rating and the blue wavelengths will still blow out the colors and not look quite right. If we have any professional photographers on this forum, they can probably elaborate on this topic quite well. There is also the CRI R9 scale which includes red in the color accuracy score as CRI only covers 15 colors but excludes red for some reason. CRI R9 is mainly used in photography for accurate skin tones and such. I’ll expand on this a bit below just for people’s curiosity if you’re interested, keep reading. haha
Halogen bulbs basically have a CRI of 100 (at most) and HIDs can range from 50-90 CRI depending on quality. High quality HID bulbs have a UV filter that filters out most of the UV output, which is good for 2 reasons. 1. HID lamps produce a massive amount of UV rays due to the nature of igniting a gas in the capsule (an electric arc like welding) and this can damage your eyes like looking at the sun or welding. 2. Strong UV rays WILL burn out the bowl of a projector due to the massive amounts of UV radiation and the chrome lining will be destroyed and the light is now useless. It’s a common misconception that HIDs create massive amounts of heat that cause the projector bowl to destroy, but it’s actually poor quality UV filtering that destroys the chrome plating. That’s why in the early days of people putting HIDs in their halogen-based headlights, you’d often see the reflector of non-projector headlights have spots where the chrome is missing. As long as it’s a reputable brand (not DDM Tuning), this isn’t a problem anymore, although it’s still not recommended for many reasons.
As for the LED headlights, that’s why I don’t really care for the LED headlights, but we don’t really have the option unless you want to swap out the base model’s halogen headlights and fog lamps. Not to mention the cost and you’ll need to take it to a dealer so they can disable the reactive headlight assist feature. At least the fog lights can easily be swapped out for halogen ones (Toyota Tacoma H11 based fog lights should fit, I’ll try to verify later tonight if interested, they’re not the best halogen fog lights out there) or Diode Dynamics SS3 fog lights with Selective Yellow which really helps reduce the harshness of the front lighting. Even in dry conditions, Selective Yellow helps fight eye strain. Plus, they’re low enough that you don’t have to aim them with a huge drop in distance, and they really do reach a long way for a fog lamp, which helps a lot with spotting things in channels further away than usual. Our LED headlights and fog lights are about 6000K with a CRI of about 70, as verified by a spectrometer that will be linked below. They peak in the 420-450 nm color spectrum, which is at the heart of the UV spectrum. This is why LED headlights “blind” oncoming traffic so badly compared to a halogen or selective yellow light source, I won’t get into the a$$ hats that use plug’n’play (PNP) LEDs in halogen housings and the science of why it has less performance than a halogen… oh how i hate that trend. This UV spectrum is also why it is harsh on your vision and your eyes tend to focus unconsciously, which degrades vision outside of the light pattern. In fact the American Medical Association recommends staying away from light above 5700K as it can be harmful to the human circadian rhythm and affect sleep patterns! This is why the “white” LED up front makes it difficult to see in bad weather conditions due to our lights peaking in the UV spectrum, which causes the light to reflect more harshly from moisture/snow in the air or on the road towards the driver. That’s where halogen and selective yellow lights shine!
Anyway, I’ll stop with the lectures and try my best to stick to the topic at hand. lol Makes me curious what the CRI of the Oznium lights is now🤔 I could start a comprehensive lighting thread if you’d be interested, I just don’t know which subthread it would belong in and how much interest it would have? It can be a very dry subject for people who are not lighting nerds.
Here are some links for the curious.
Third party testing of Subaru OEM LED fog lights showing luxury readings, CRI and spectrum analysis. Additionally, almost every SAE Compliant aftermarket fog light, go to page 1 of the thread for links to his testing of those and the initial products tested before others were on the market.
It would be terrible, incompatible and too narrow. Example: The width of the SS3 Sport fog is actually too wide to fit even in the garage: [IMG] Trare VS FL in…
www.tacomaworld.com
And some more information on light colors (Kelvin) and CRI. Quite an easy read (pun intended) and very easy to understand compared to my ramblings. haha
www.ledlightexpert.com
