Looks great man!!! I did the exact same thing last weekend I didn’t want to mess with ballasts and etc and I changed both of mine to LED as well and mine is an 07 so I used h7 in the dark it looks pretty good and the brights are really really bright. But I went with the normal design. Boslla Minimal H7 LED Headlight... Amazon.com: Boslla Minimal H7 LED Headlight Bulbs, All-in-One Conversion Kit-60W 7200lm 6500K Cool White: Automotive


But I did end up having to put a relay so my turn signals weren’t flashing at supersonic speed haha. But that might be my fault for also putting in LED turn signal bulbs.

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Thanks! I'm pleased with the change. I, too, considered HID but went with LED for simplicity.

And yeah - I'm assuming it's the LEDs in the turn signals that changed the blink rate, because you increased the apparent impedance of the bulbs.

 

I am a professional optical engineer, who designed the Diode Dynamics SL1 bulbs, and have since left that company in bad terms so I have no reason to drive business towards anyone. But I hate to say that the bulb you picked is one of the worst. The optical center is nowhere close to the location of the halogen filament in order to properly focus the light.

will it be bright white and look nice on the wall? sure. will you actually be able to see any better far down range instead of just up close foreground? No. Because you’ve moved the optical filament so the projector bowl can’t properly focus the light where it needs to go.

I’ve tried to make this clear in any headlight discussion about the elises, the small projector bowls on these cars makes it impossible for a GOOD led replacement. Your best bet is getting an HID kit in there, and the absolute best is a proper HID retrofit with a projector bowl designed just for it.

once again, as a professional who works with automotive headlights for a living. Putting these types of bulbs in the lotus headlights is a waste of money, reduces actual visible distance, and ultimately not worth doing on your $30-50k cars. Spring for the proper retrofit or and HID kit to replace the halogen bulb.

 

Your best bet is getting an HID kit in there, and the absolute best is a proper HID retrofit with a projector bowl designed just for it.

Do you have a recommendation on a quality HID kit?

 

We need a place for sticky’s - the above post is a prime candidate for this

 

The stickies for lighting are at the top of the Lighting forum. I moved this thread to that forum, but I'd prefer an on-topic thread about LED deficiencies so there's a relevant subject line to stick. If there is one, PM me.

I also added this thread to the Uberpost under LED Headlight replacement with a clear note suggesting people read this thread and others with information from MConte05 before choosing LED over HID.

 

I knew that the LEDs wouldn't match the original halogens geometrically, but I didn't do this with zero consideration. Based on the admittedly limited dimensional information I have, the position of the LEDs is similar to the position of the halogen filament, relative the the mounting flange. I created the 25mm line on the drawing by scaling the 70mm dimension:

I recognize that the way a filament emits light isn't the same as the way an array of LEDs emits light - the former is essentially isotropic, while the latter probably emits at 140deg or so off of the LED surface, with the majority of the power concentrated in the middle 60deg. So the LEDs throw a lot less of their light forward and backwards. But given that the halogens probably provide around 2,000 lumens, and the LEDs [claim to] provide 8,000lm, then I'm hoping that the 4x increase will compensate at least a bit for the less effective geometry.

I'm definitely not saying you're wrong - you aren't. The optics in the headlights were designed specifically for H7 halogen bulbs, and not for LEDs. But I'm hoping that on the geometry of the LEDs being "close enough" that their increased optical output will mean that my headlights provide at least the same visibility as the halogens, but with a color that I like a lot more. I'll find out when I go out in the dark next time.

 

I'm definitely not saying you're wrong - you aren't. The optics in the headlights were designed specifically for H7 halogen bulbs, and not for LEDs. But I'm hoping that on the geometry of the LEDs being "close enough" that their increased optical output will mean that my headlights provide at least the same visibility as the halogens, but with a color that I like a lot more. I'll find out when I go out in the dark next time.

Unfortunately when working on this small of a scale, even half a millimeter matters. This was a tough concept to try and illustrate when we developed the SL1 bulbs, which were designed to mimic the halogen filament as best as we could by using luxeon ZES chips which had the same width and height of a halogen filament. However the thickness of the double sided copper board, plus the height of the chip itself meant that the emitting face of the LED was still about 2x "thicker" than a real filament. Because we had the height and width just right, it was still amazingly better than what was out there. Here is one of the crappy marketing pictures they put together. Notice how the LED chips are narrow and stacked tight and close on a thin board. This gets us about halfway to "proper".

However they were not perfect, and in some headlights would be amazing because of the way the headlight was designed to reflect the light would work nicely with the filament orientation and the "thickness" wouldn't matter. This was why the 2015 F-150 was used SO much in the marketing material, because it happened to be perfect for it. However for projector type headlights? Where they use the entire emitting area, and required to be focused tightly in order to concentrate that hotspot on the cutoff shield? Absolutely awful, and when doing lux measurements (measuring the light intensity at a certain distance) in some cases the lux would be cut in half over the OEM halogen. But there would be so much foreground scatter with the bright "clean" white light that customers were still happy, hooray.

The way I try to do an example is to pretend you are using a laser pointer on a mirror. If you have a point you are trying to aim for on a wall, and bouncing the laser off a mirror to hit that point, there is a certain angle and location that'll let you do that. Now move the laser pointer 3" in any direction, but keep that angle. That point on the wall is now going to be nowhere close to the original point on the wall. Now pretend you are aiming for a point like 100' away (aka down the road), so that 3" that you moved the laser pointer, is going to move that dot 100' away by feet, the error gets worse and worse the further downrange you are aiming for when you make small location adjustments at the source. That's the same concept for improper sources inside a small projector bowl. Which is why the precise concentration of light on the hotspot, aka what lets you see down the road further, is extremely dependent on the exact filament location and size, but all the scatter around the hotspot doesn't really matter.

The HID "filament" while not exact, is still an high intensity arc that can be much closer in size to the original filament with higher intensity. Since the Elise/Exige has a cutoff-type projector we can increase the intensity "under" the hard cutoff without too much worry of blinding oncoming traffic or anything. This picture helps show the arc vs filament vs LED chips. Don't mind the numbers. Focus on the filament replication.

Now.... I'm not saying you are an idiot or anything. The sheer amount of misinformation out there about lighting is staggering. It's honestly part of why I left the automotive lighting industry when I started my own business. I just couldn't stand trying to write these posts every week on various auto forums, or having to read all the comments about automotive lighting on articles and facebook posts. Just too mentally draining. Even the NHSTA and DOT has had to step in and start fining companies for trying to sell these LED replacements as "street legal" because they are nowhere near it, so glad I got out before that shitstorm started going down a year ago.

However, I love this community and I want to make sure our sweet ass cars have the right kind of lighting.

 

Please keep us posted. Thank you.

 

Wow, @MConte05 - excellent detailed explanation of the design considerations for headlights. Sorry you had to write that up yet again on another auto forum - but know that it's much appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to educate rather than just leaving it at "I'm an engineer, so trust me" (I'm an engineer as well, and try to avoid doing that). This really does belong on a sticky somewhere - as you said, there's a ton of misinformation out there, and this helps.

I'll go learn about HID options, now. In the meantime, I'll see how the LEDs "work" in the dark. It'll be impossible for me to judge whether they actually provide better illumination than the halogens. Based on your explanation, that seems incredibly unlikely anyway. But since they're already in there I may as well try them out.

 

Would the LEDs have a chance of being "good enough" for the high beams? It's gonna be hard enough to get one HID ballast into that headlight assembly, and I could use HID for the projectors, and keep the LEDs in the reflectors with the same or similar color temperature.

 

Yep! The LED's in the high beam is actually great. You don't have to worry about a cutoff, and though not perfectly concentrated, usually the power overcomes it. Plus it's often on for short duration so the instant-on plus a cold LED = high lumens when you need it.

Now I sold my Elise before I got into the lighting industry, but on my 996 911 what I did was use a morimoto HID kit, plus the 2-stroke LED's in the high beams. Worked out well. At that time I refused to give Diode any of my money (like I said, bad break, ha) so I just went with the company that knocked off my design but knew they were still pretty close.

I also need to mention, HID in projector like headlights designed for halogen bulbs = okay. HID's in reflector type headlights designed for halogen = not okay. Because the filament isn't exact, and the intensity is so high, it can be quite blinding. However since Lotus has always had projector bowls in the Elise/Exige/Evora I feel comfortable saying just put an HID kit in the lows', and LED in the high.

 

🍿🍿🍿

 

@shinoo at Inokinetic is currently a developing a full drop-in replacement for the Elise/Exige headlight buckets. I suspect this will be THE lighting upgrade we've all been waiting for. There's a thread on it if you do a search.

 

I know at one point that Shinoo sold an HID dip beam kit that came with its own projector, so presumably well matched. Anyone know if that is still available anywhere?

 

@MConte05 - you should just start a new thread in Lighting and just copy and paste that detailed explanation post into it. That’ll make something proper for sticky-ing.

 

Any reliable information for module and bulb for led front turn signal replacement in an '05?

 

I am looking to get a new sets of factory bulbt kit. I would assume I have to get both H1 & H7 for both front lights. I was also debating to get a LED replacement so I could have brighter visibility while driving when it's dark. Do you have any recommendation for the good factory bulb kit for the S2 Exige.

 

As it seems the factory bulbs are "no longer serviced," wondering what you ended up doing?

 

Hm. So for 2008 - 2011 S2 Eliges, is fully converting to LEDs from Halogens imply a matter of replacing the halogen bulbs with (hopefully good quality) H7 sized LED bulbs?

Almost seems too good to be true. On the other hand, they're just bulbs.