[adc]

Okay, now if the bulb mounting solution on the 135 is anything resembling the E92 335, I am not surprised that it is hard to get either LED's or very blue incandescents to work well.

I have a set of incandescents (MTec's from ebay) - I think they are 4200k - and while a measurable improvement over stock, they still don't match the Xenons. But at least, the intensity is at least as good as stock.

The more blue tint you add to the glass of an incandescent bulb, the less light it outputs (mainly because incandescents don't generate a lot of blue-wavelength radiation). That is why the higher you go with the Kelvin (the bluer the lights) the dimmer they will be.

Switching out to LED's this problem goes away, but now you start having topological problems. As far as I could tell when swapping out the stock bulbs, the OEM locations are not very well optimized to take the light from all around the bulbs - they seemed to me to mostly take light from directly in front of the bulb.

But LED bulbs have most of their LED components on the sides of the bulb - so they don't generate a lot of light directly in front of them.


The E90 (sedan) system uses a specialized bulb with a carefully designed light output beam (straight ahead), which is why they can get truly spectacular (albeit expensive) aftermarket replacements.


I imagine most of you already knew some of this, I guess I'm just pointing out how poorly designed the OEM light path and socket are. Unless someone designs an H8 LED solution specifically just for our cars, I am not sure we will have the results we want. :iono: