I cannot overstate how much of a difference it made switching them all to 3000k warm whites. Of course instead of being replaceable bulbs they were all SMDs directly soldered onto little PCBs making it a bit of a project … but so worth it!
I cannot overstate how much of a difference it made switching them all to 3000k warm whites. Of course instead of being replaceable bulbs they were all SMDs directly soldered onto little PCBs making it a bit of a project … but so worth it!
I found a German company that sent me a free sample of their amber film. As I recall their market was semiconductor manufacturing, but I can’t find them again. Amazon has a variety of films that should work.
A sheet of Rosco 3408 takes you from about 5500K to 3800K so a much warmer colour. A small sheet which should be enough goes for about £7 https://shopwl.com/rosco-roscolux-3408-roscosun-1-2-cto/ you can probably find it cheaper just by searching Rosco 3408
I own a 90s BMW and the interior lighting looks phenomenal in that car. Not great for passenger night reading or applying makeup though. Haha
Desoldering/soldering was a pain as they were tiny; like 2mmx2mm. One cool thing I learned though is that you can use a multimeter in its ‘continuity’ setting to provide enough current to light up these small LEDs which is very convenient when testing if you soldered them correctly.
https://www.zgsm-china.com/blog/something-you-should-know-ab...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiguan/comments/1hq2hae/changed_ove...
I modded most LEDs in my house because 2700-3000K is too warm for me, but 4000K is too cool. So I mix them ;)
Do you by chance have any resources (videos or tutorials) to recommend that show how this is best done?
Not only the color temperature is so cold, but usually the spectrum is terrible, and the quality of the light is awful.
I just have to finish choosing the led driver :P
Lucky friends! Maybe repair shops could offer customized interior lighting as an aftermarket service.
Truth is, aftermarket lights for cars (typical AliExpress or Amazon stuff) always focus on brightness, but never on quality. It's usual for taxi drivers to have aftermarket lights in the vehicle, so you can find your money or credit card more easily, but the light quality is always terrible. :P
It seems like such needless work. All I want are ~3000k LED widgets in various standard-automotive sizes that aren't stupid.
What I get are ~3000k LED widgets that are overdriven and painful to be around at night, which also have extra "CANBUS" resistors that only serve as heaters.
It's all pretty repulsive. Some recentl examples I got consumed 2.6 Watts, and about half of that was deliberately wasted as nothing but heat.
(2.6 Watts is quite a lot for a little LED board to dissipate, which results in early failures and flickering and other nonsense.)
But with the stupid heater-resistors removed, that dropped to only an eye-burning 1.3 Watts.
With the current-limiting resistor swapped to a higher value, power consumption was reduced to a few hundred mW and the light output approximated the relatively-unintrusive incandescent lamp that was originally fitted.
And finally, after all of that work of finding and modding the things, I can open the car door at night without becoming blind -- just like it was the 1990s again -- and also preserve the battery for things like starting the engine.
LED bulbs exacerbate an already existing problem caused by vehicle noses being too tall such that the headlight is exactly eye-height for other drivers. Sometimes they're poorly calibrated too, aiming too high. Many drivers also retrofit super bright LED lights on older cars that do a very bad job at properly focusing the beam on the ground (same thing was happening with drivers modding their old mirror reflector headlights with xenon lamps and giving everyone on the road an artists impression of a supernova up-close).
I've seen cars with lights that were obviously very bright but very well calibrated to point as much as possible to the road instead of my eyes. Those are maybe marginally more tiring than the warmer and much dimmer lights used in the past, but this is more than compensated in safety so probably a worthwhile trade. Proper calibration and sensible placing make all the difference.
So by this measure, not having to squint to see anything ahead, my (aging) eyes feel much more rested and reassured today than decades ago.
Are there new cars with warm LED lights?
I think it's a pretty good balance between visibility and comfort. But I can definitely see your point.
> Are there new cars with warm LED lights?
I don't know actually, but I've definitely not seen any on the road. I wonder why, as far as I know it's not a technical issue.