FYI, Daniel Stern's opinion
Oh, geeze. NO, SIR, DON'T DO IT. TheRetrofitSource's entire
product line is trinkets from China. NONE of it is safe,
legal, or legitimate lighting equipment. So-called
"projector retrofits" are no good. My colleague Virgil has
posted a good, thorough description of some(!) of the
problems and issues with this what you're asking about, at
http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?380558-What-s-wrong-with-projector-retrofits
.
And halogen lamps need to use halogen bulbs or they don't
(can't, won't) work effectively, safely, or legally. The
"LED bulbs" now flooding the market are not a legitimate,
safe, effective, or legal product. No matter whose name is
on them or what the vendor claims, these are a fraudulent
scam. They are not capable of producing even a fraction of
the amount of light produced by the filament bulb they
supposedly replace, let alone producing it in the right
pattern for the lamp's optics to work.
Same goes for "HID kits" in halogen-bulb headlamps or
fog/auxiliary lamps (any kit, any lamp, any vehicle no
matter whether it's a car, truck, motorcycle, etc.). They do
not work safely or effectively, which is why they are
illegal. See
http://www.danielsternlighting.com/tech/bulbs/Hid/conversions/conversions.html
-- the particulars are different for LED vs. HID, but the
principles and problems are the same overall. Again, halogen
lamps need to use halogen bulbs or they don't work right.
More info on where these "Use [these illegitimate lights],
they're great!" and "I have [these inadequate lights] and
love them!" types of comments come from:
The difficulty is, what we feel like we're seeing isn't what
we're actually seeing. The human visual system is a lousy
judge of how well it's doing. "I know what I can see!" seems
reasonable, but it doesn't square up with reality because we
humans are just not well equipped to accurately evaluate how
well or poorly we can see (or how well a headlamp works).
Our subjective impressions tend to be very far out of line
with objective, real measurements of how well we can (or
can't) see. The primary factor that drives subjective
ratings of headlamps is foreground light, that is light on
the road surface close to the vehicle...which is almost
irrelevant; it barely even makes it onto the _bottom_ of the
list of factors that determine a headlamp's actual safety
performance. A moderate amount of foreground light is
necessary so we can use our peripheral vision to keep track
of the lane lines and keep our focus up the road where it
should be, but too much foreground light works against us:
it draws our gaze downward even if we consciously try to
keep looking far ahead, and the bright pool of light causes
our pupils to constrict, which destroys our distance vision.
All of this while creating the feeling that we've got "good"
lights. It's not because we're lying to ourselves or
fooling ourselves or anything like that, it's because our
visual systems just don't work the way it feels like they work.
And it's a safety double-whammy because most poor-quality
headlamps produce just about nothing _but_ foreground light:
a wash of light close to the vehicle, but no concentrated
hot spot to throw light down the road where you need it, so
you get severely deficient seeing distance unless you aim
the lamps up in the air (and then they blind everyone on the
road, some of whom will write you tickets for it).
