Best 9003 bulbs?

[TechGuru]

That's a matter of poor choice; high-CRI LEDs are available with 3000K, 3500K, 4000K CCTs.

All retail cares about is their bottom line these days and 6500K china specials are very cheap compared to everything else.

Those are weak headlamps (even if they're real Toyota ones in perfect condition and aim); they really need all the help they can get.

I keep telling him to upgrade them to factory HID by pulling the HID system from a salvage yard.

 

[John_Galt]

Yes on the high beam...probably not so much on the low beam; look at here. Really not a good idea to run high-wattage low beams in a truck or SUV: way too much glare unless you aim the lamps way too low, thusly giving yourself insufficient seeing distance and an overlit foreground.

The single biggest improvement you could make for your nighttime seeing is to replace these knockoffs with genuine Toyota parts. They really are that much better.

Right as rain! Whoever manages to invent the light antifilter, which adds more light as light passes through it, is going to be an instant trillionaire. They'll be able to spend some of their money on things like a molecular transporter, a warp drive or hyperdrive, disrupters and phasers, replicators, holodecks, and computer cores with bioneural gel packs, all of which will exist along with the antifilter.

The lowbeam of the Osram rallye 100/90 H4 tests better than the philips version you shared test data with. But similarly to your test data, the % improvement is not much higher than the best performing +Focus rated performance bulbs. Which really is a testament to the performance that is eked out from a stock wattage low beam filament. However the highbeam performance blows the legal wattage bulbs out of the water, something that is also demonstrated in your test data. I never had a chance to try out the osram 64205 which was the preferred 2nd gen tacoma upgrade favorite, although I have, I believe, a final pair of unused 64205 "replacement" test bulbs from Stern. The selective yellow pair suffered an untimely demise, with the envelope actually sagging down to touch the lowbeam filament, without bursting, and becoming increasingly opaque/amber in color.

>replacement headlamps

I had a thread about these lamps several years ago. Then, as now, the passenger side OEM lamp is still available, but the driver side lamp is/was not, anywhere I looked. The depo capa units were ones you stated would be the best of the rest. The oem drivers lamp was the first to fail on me, with the reflector bowl shedding its coating, then pitting and corroding over the course of a month or so. Moisture killed the passenger side lamp a while later after the truck was submerged. The depo units at least have a glass lens. So one less thing to worry about failing/hazing/crazing.

 

[Hilldweller]

Sounds like maybe that's a bit short, but I think maybe some X-Treme Visions I put in an '01 Corolla also didn't go quite as long as I'd like. One failed in maybe 6 or 9 months (but with a lot of headlamp usage). Still, the benefits of a high-performance bulb include lumen maintenance and beam focus-- a standard bulb, and worse, a "long life" bulb, will continue to light up long after its performance has dropped off, as you well know. Shorter life, but much higher quality of life, in a manner of speaking.

Thankfully, bulbs are easy to change in the Corolla.

They were Amazon buys that took three tries to get me the correct size. sigh
And the bulbs in my wife's car -- easy to change on the passenger's side and impossible for a 6'5" guy to change on the driver's side.