Maybe OT: LED bulb for car interior light

Doesn't the spec sheet of the bulb tell you? B-)

That is *very* blue as a colour temperature. You might not like the "cold" feel to the light at that sort of CT. I'd stick below 5000 K and nearer the low end of that. Matching CT across various types of LED bulb can be fun as well, festoon, footwell, map reading...

Thanks for your reply Dave but no, the website I found hasn't got spec sheets on there.

It doesn't need to be aesthetically pleasing, it just needs to be as bright as possible so that I can see if/when things are dropped on the floor and stuff like that but I take your point. Does lower temp have an effect on brightness?

Difficult one to answer, it depends upon how you perceive the colour. I like the higher CT's they do seem to be brighter / whiter to me personally, but others hate the effect.

A low CT value seems to be more of a restful light.

I replaced the dim, very yellow interior lights (black leather interior and carpets) with white and it is now much better than it was. They are not expensive - why not get a sample of each CT?

then there's no knowing what they put out

No. I'd go for warm white, 3000K or so, otherwise it'll look nasty.

NT

I've always preferred the 'whiteness' of fluorescent lamps to 'normal' lamps in the house, it's just the way my eyes work I suppose. Our car is like yours with black leather and black carpets, so I think I'll stay with 6000K but now we're back to the original question of which is the brighter bulb - one with 18 4014s or one with 6 5630s? I know they're not exactly expensive but after paying £5,500 for the car then £1,400 for the LPG conversion, £350 for cambelt/water pump, £250 for two tyres, and about £250 for all the fluids to be changed, the wife is getting a bit pigged off with me :')

jim has brought this to us :

About £4 each and I need 8 or 9 of them - but see my reply to Harry Bloomfield above.

This is not a car light that you will be using for long periods and for me the cooler white gives better contrast. All the headlight bulbs that claim to be brighter are towards the blue side of the spectrum.

I also prefer the cool white (blue) for household use.

It happens that jim formulated :

It's nothing of the sort. It's just that I don't like wasting money and would like to buy the right thing, first time - which is why I'm asking advice. I could use my own (lack of) knowledge and 'just get them' but I was hoping that someone here might have the knowledge to say "Go for that one" or maybe even "Neither of those - this one is better"

The LEDs I've been looking at are advertised as CANbus error free.

If the originals were the tubular tungsten often used for car interior lights, they do produce a pretty feeble and nasty light.

That might be the case with LED as making them towards the 'warm' end seems to reduce the efficiency. But not so with HID.

Brr. ;-)

Dave Plowman (News) formulated on Thursday :

No, they were those glass baseless lamps, which push into a slot, three at the front two at the rear. I couldn't even attempt to read a map with them, but the white LED replacements are much, much better.

The one disadvantage was that they don't gradually dim as they did, they just flicker a bit then die.

Steve presented the following explanation :

It is unlikely that interior lights will be on the CANbus, no need for them to be monitored.

Any risk of it being turned on by a passenger while you are driving at night when "as bright as possible" might be "so bright I didn't see that bend"?

Not unless the passenger was trying to get out at the time, and I can assure you I don't drive that manically lol

Silly me, I thought that was answered already.

Some time ago I was reading various reports of the lighting qualities of LEDs. The opinions included the idea that the most natural colour balance for our eyes was usually the most effective.

I don't have any exact equivalents to compare (that is, the same except for colour) but I feel it might be true. One torch must be something like 6000K and it doesn't seem to be any better for finding things than a less powerful one with a more even colour balance and somewhat lower colour temperature.

It's too simplistic to be useful

Daylight is in the 5000-15000K + region.

NT

Problem with most high efficiency lamps - of any type - is they tend not to have a continuous light spectrum output. Ie, there will be spikes and troughs in the response. Smoothing that out tends to reduce the efficiency. So that high efficiency torch - although looking very bright

- may not make things look like you remember them.

Steve explained :

Ok, being as no one could give a definitive answer I got a couple of each to try. Whilst my eyes can't really see much difference between the two, I have to say that I'm well pleased with the final result. You may think differently but, for my eyes and preference, the 6000K look very bright in our car at night, which is exactly what I wanted. The car has a black leather interior and black carpets so the 'whiteness' of the 6000K against that is excellent. I got them from here and can highly recommend them: