What's best, HID or LED?

Recently, many customers have asked us "What's best, HID or LED?"

As an automotive lighting supplier for nearly 20 years, Xenons Online have witnessed HID Bulbs replacing Halogen Bulbs, and now we believe that LED bulbs will also start to replace HID Bulbs.

Up until the last couple of years, most Led Bulbs wouldn't have had a chance. The rate of which LED Bulbs are advancing we don't think it will be long until people start swapping out old dated OEM HID Bulbs such as D1s HID Bulbs, D3s HID Bulbs and the older D2s HID Bulbs. 

Halogen Bulbs such as the popular H7 Halogen Bulb are already commonly swapped out for H7 LED Bulbs which makes a massive improvement so why not swap out for example a D1s HID Bulb for an improved D1s LED Bulb?

OEM LED Bulbs are slowly starting to make appearances at trade fairs from LED Manufacturers, some have which we have tested and provided feedback for.

We will soon have our hands on our prototypes for testing so it's certainly something to keep your eyes open for.

So the answer to the question is... We believe LED has the potential to out perform HID and the reasons are below.

1. The luminous efficiency of LED is higher than that of HID, HID can produce upto 60 lumens per Watt Vs the 100 lumens per what from LED.

2. The beam pattern produced by a HID bulb is not very good and requires a Projector to attempt to clean that beam pattern up and direct the light into all the right places. We have already had great success from our Project-X LED Bulbs producing near perfect beam patterns Vs a HID Bulb tested in the same projector headlight. So we know this is already achievable.

 3. In heavy bad weather conditions such as heavy rain, fog or snow the penetration of HID isnt as good as what we have already seen when converting Halogen Bulbs to HID and LED. With the latest generation of LED Bulbs which we are now supplying we are seeing great results with the light penetrating the bad weather.

4. Start Up Delay, due to the technology behind HID Bulbs we see a delay of upto 30 seconds in some instances before reaching full brightness.  Where as LED is instant. This is most noticeable in a Bi-Xenon headlamp when the HID Bulb is being used as a Main Beam (Flash).