Hello and welcome to ABD TV where we aim to answer all of those burning questions, clear up the confusions and leave you brimming with knowledge.
Today we’re answering a comment left on our last video where we looked at whether a red LED would be better than a white LED behind a red lens.
The answer was yes, the red LED is better. If you’ve not seen the video, you should go and check it out.
However I made a sweeping statement in that video where I said…
“When upgrading to LED, go with the colour that the application is for, regardless of whether your standard bulb is white or coloured. This will give you the best and brightest results…”
After posting the video, we got a very interesting comment suggesting that we were correct about a red LED behind a red lens, but in the case of an Amber lens, you are actually better off with a white led instead of amber.
This piqued our interest and we had to check it out.
So we took out 2 amber lensed indicators from a Jaguar XJSC to run our test.
In one, we put a white 382 Twenty20 Cree LED, in the other we put this an Amber one. Let’s see what happened:
In this image, the white LED is installed in the right indicator unit, the Amber LED is in the left.
As you can see, the white LED is actually coming through a bit brighter. It looks a bit exaggerated on the image, the difference isn’t a lot, but the white LED definitely takes the win on brightness alone.
This is because of the white is closer to amber on the colour spectrum than it was when we tested with the red bulbs. Therefore the lens is letting through a higher amount of of the 750 lumens created by the white LED.
The amber bulb still has a respectable 300 lumens, which is all coming through, but it’s just falling short compared with the white bulb.
However, what is also significant is the colour of the light. You can see that the white LED on the right is creating a very washed out light yellow output. While this is bright, it does not have the stand out contrast of a full “orangey” amber bulb.
In contrast, the amber bulb on the left is creating a very orangey amber light. This will be easier to see by other road users, especially in the daytime.
With this test, we will leave it up to you to decide which is best to go for. Do you prefer the extra brightness of the white LED? or would you prefer the more distinct orange amber light? It is a bit of a trade off and I think this one might divide opinion a bit more. Let us know in the comments below which you prefer.
If you have any questions on this, or have something else you’d like to see us cover in a future ABD TV episode, please put them in the comments below or email us.
Until the next time, take care and be brilliant!
Author: ABD.co.uk
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