This site uses income-earning affiliate links. When you click a link to a product on this website and make a purchase, I may receive a commission.
LED headlights get a lot of hate, but I love them. The hate stems from people putting LED’s in projector housings that were never made for LEDs. This leads to having effectively no pattern or cutoff to the light and just blasting everyone’s eye holes out.
Done correctly, LED headlights have the same cutoff as the halogen bulbs they replace while being brighter, using less power, and lasting much longer.
I’ve used LED headlights from SuperBrightLEDs.com on the last few cars I’ve owned and I pretty much swear by them for anything that came factory equipped with halogens. They ship fast, they know their stuff, they put out a quality product and they stand behind it with a real warranty. This time around, I got a pair for H4 LED headlights for my 99 Miata NB. These put out 4000 lumens at a cool 6500k color temp.
I didn’t do a video or anything because these are very much plug and play. You literally just take out the factory bulbs and put these in their place. There is one little catch though, which I will get to. First, here are a couple of pics of the factory halogens. Notice the cut off pattern over on the wooden doors.
Notice that the factory bulbs, like all factory bulbs, have a nice sharp cut off just a few feet off the ground. This is why headlights don’t generally blind you, they’re aimed pretty low and the reflectors keep the light focused down at that low level.
To install the bulbs, take the mounting flange off the bulb, put it in the headlight using the factory wire bulb holder, then stick the bulb into the flange and rotate. I left off the factory rubber boots. I think it will be fine, but in the event this ends up being a huge mistake, I will post about it here.
There’s only really one “gotcha” to this installation. The bulbs have to be aligned correctly or you will NOT get a nice clean cutoff and proper lighting. If you end up installing a bulb and you get something that looks like the beam pattern on the driver side in this picture:
You need to take the bulb back out of the flange, rotate it 180°, and put it back in, then you’ll get the nice clean cutoff and proper beam pattern you are after.
Even in these pictures, the difference is noticeable, but it’s SUPER noticeable at night. I will add some night time pictures to this post as soon as I get my 65mph vibration fixed and drive the damn thing home.
