More Lumens, Same Wattage

Warchild has opined before that although the stock headlights and wattage are decent--one can get more lumens for the same amount of watts by getting a different brand and model of light.  Philips VisionPlus are his favorite and are supposedly 50% brighter than stock.

Doing some creative Googling I found a GE Megalight Plus that claims +60% over a stock bulb and they weren't on Dale's list.  He hadn't heard of them before, so I figured they were new and decided to spring for a set--especially since Autolamps-Online had this offer of buy one set of lights and get the second at half price.  The H7s were $33.74 and H4s were $23.99 or $12.00 at half price.  So my shipment was $45.74 and shipping was free.  This was about $20 cheaper than I could find the Philips for.

I'd love to say that my order was flawless, but it wasn't.  Autolamps-Online is in England and their free shipping is standard mail.  I ordered January 5th and they still hadn't arrived several weeks later.  They insisted they'd arrive 10-15 business days given the mail.  No show, so they sent out a second shipment.  The H4 bulbs finally came at the end of February and the H7 finally came March 4th.   Two months is just too long.

The Test

My test was to go out to a wall of my local high school and shoot my digital camera from the same angle at three different distances from the wall before and after bulb change.  I purposely turned off the flash.  First was with the stock H4 low beams, then stock high beams, and high beams with stock H7 Hella FF50 driving lights.

After I swapped out bulbs I drove back to the same wall and reshot with the succession of GE bulbs.

My initial observation riding from my garage is that I couldn't really tell a difference.  At the wall I couldn't tell much either, but think maybe things were a bit brighter with the GE bulbs.

I came back with my camera and downloaded the images.  Bringing up most of them side-by-side I can't say that things were magically better.  Maybe the GEs are bit brighter, but they don't seem 60% brighter.  The pattern seems a little different--perhaps a bit brighter towards the center.

They're Better--Maybe

A side-by-side Photoshop Composite is below.  This is long distance with high beams.  Left half of the composite is stock and right half is GE.  This is the photo I could see the most difference between bulbs.

Stock Low Beam

GE Low Beam

In without further ado it's the max lumens from the two setups:

Stock High Beam Plus Stock Hella FF50

GE High Beam and GE Hella FF50

My Hella alignment is different this round and the light is closer together so it's pretty hard to tell if there's any empirical difference in lumens.  Regardless, it's damn bright.

Final analysis

Perhaps I'll think better when I'm actually out night driving, but shining on a local gym wall--I don't think the bulbs live up to their hype and expense.  I may go do a side-by-side with Dale's bike and see if the Philips are better or not.

I still am pretty happy with my FF50 purchase.  $40 for double the light is pretty budget minded.  We'll see after my first Utah 1088 whether $600+ PHIDs are the way to go.

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