NAPA's LED sealed beam lamps

Mr. Merk

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I'm betting the experts will break our hearts, but I hope they are better than standard sealed beams. These would be perfect for those of us wanting to maintain the period-look of our older cars.
 

Alaric Darconville

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I don't know anything about them myself, but I sure hope they're good, because their glass lens means they could be on the vehicle a long time (we could hope that a really junky unit with a plastic lens would end up getting replaced in relatively short order). Sadly, they've gone for that 6000K nonsense.

I thought they might be PFR Truck-Lites, but they don't seem to make an LED headlamp like this one.
 

-Virgil-

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Total and complete garbage, in accordance with NAPA's apparent present lighting line strategy -- it no longer contains any respectable bulbs or sealed beams, instead it's all poorest-quality junk. None of the products are made by technically competent suppliers, and even without having tested each and every product in the line, the consistent bad showing of those items I have tested (and the, shall we say, "highly questionable" safety certifications) make me sadly confident that the whole line can only be warned about, not recommended. These NAPA NightVision LED sealed beams reveals they are made in China for Old World Industries, which is the company behind the Peak brand of engine antifreeze, and recently (2019) it decided to add a lighting product line. They could have spent the necessary money on good (or at least decent) product by PFRing from one of the reputable makers, or even from an also-ran like Wagner. Instead they bought the automotive lighting activity from Eiko, already disreputable for poor quality and poor performance, and further degraded it by sourcing the cheapest lookalikes they could get out of China, then spent money hyping up this junk with marketing and packaging. And that appears to be a successful strategy; I'm sure the NAPA deal is very lucrative. However, for those consumers and end-users who want to actually be able to see and be seen at night, the only good advice is to stay away from NAPA sealed beams and bulbs.

To be more specific: these are generic sealed beam lenses, intended for use with transverse-oriented filament(s), and instead they are in front of LED light sources with very different output characteristics in terms of light distribution. Or in three words: a complete mess.
 
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-Virgil-

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for those of us wanting to maintain the period-look of our older cars
...there are solid options that will actually provide safe-to-excellent seeing at night. This dreck from NAPA isn't on that list.
 

jlwm

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To be more specific: these are generic sealed beam lenses, intended for use with transverse-oriented filament, and instead they are in front of LED light sources with very different output characteristics in terms of light distribution. Or in three words: a complete mess.

It's sad to hear that, but I'm not surprised. I thought maybe, just maybe NAPA was selling a cost effective upgrade that would be on-par with JW Speaker's products, but I guess not! I'll stick with my Bosch ECE lamps paired with Philips X-tremeVision H4s until technology develops a good rectangular sealed beam LED upgrade that won't look out of place on an older car. JW Speaker already offers a "classic" line for older cars with 7" lamps, but us rectangular lamp equipped car owners have to wait.
 
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jzchen

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Not sure if you want this in a separate thread or not, (my apologies if I should have created one), but Philips appears to have a sealed beam LED lineup now. Are these bad or good?
 

-Virgil-

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The Philips lineup is sourced out of Taiwan and appears to be of at least acceptable quality. I haven't yet had a chance to do a deep dive on them, but it's on my to-do list. It is interesting to see Philips leveraging the obscure regulatory term "integral beam" as a marketing term!
 

Alaric Darconville

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Not sure if you want this in a separate thread or not, (my apologies if I should have created one), but Philips appears to have a sealed beam LED lineup now. Are these bad or good?

I see a lot of posters worried about starting new threads-- in this case (and in many of the others) posting within an existing thread is just fine. It's not a 5+ year threadsurrection and it's apposite to the ongoing discussion (sourcing good LED headlamps in sealed beam form factors out of the proliferation of new versions).
 

-Virgil-

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Yeah, don't worry about putting reasonably on-topic posts in existing threads from within the last six months or so (or even more, if it seems appropriate; there is no hard "expiration date" for threads). Last week's ruckus on the subject was caused by bad-faith behavior on the part of an individual who just wanted to stir up ѕhit.
 
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