[miki_E]

Hi,

Can I get everyones opinion for best spotlights for the 1997 sierra, have an old school steel bullbar but maybe I'd like to rig from the roof basket.

Any comparisons or reviews considering price, distance spread brightness and adaptabiloty would be very welcome.

Cheers in advance

Miki

[Brenno]

Anything LED and 7 inch.

Best is highly debatable. I have a set of 7 inch KINGS and they are more than fine.

[HarryHoudini]

I'm out of date but check your States additional lights regs.,in NSW you couldn't attach anything higher than the standard lights so roof racks/basket would be out.
Someone on here may know more but i remember a push a few years back to get standard regs. amongst the States.

[Gwagensteve]

Some thoughts:

Roof mounted lights are great off road where they are up out of the mud and also they create smaller shadows which makes driving less stressful. (deep shadows when driving off road at night make it difficult to read the terrain.) on road, they're not great for other road users as by the time you've seen the lights of the approaching car you've been dazzling them for some time.

However, notwithstanding legality, there are some other issues. They add significant aerodynamic drag ( if you're using round lights) and they're also a bit of a pain to wire because the wire runs are much longer, and usually of the vehicle concerned isn't a ute, at some point the wiring needs to transition through the bodywork. Yes, anything is possible, but it's all more work and fiddling about and fittings and plugs etc.

You've mentioned "spot lights" which is a particular style of light with a very narrow beam spared designed for high speed straight roads. i.e spotting wildlife on the highway at 100+km/h. My information might be out of date, but my understanding is nature of LED design makes this type of light very difficult to produce. The shape of light from an LED isn't shaped by a reflector, it needs to be focussed by a lens. Most of the LED lights for sale today have what I'd generously call a "driving" pattern, which lights the verge close to the car too, for cornering and tries to prevent a "hot spot" in the centre. I personally don't believe LED light designers pay much attention to pattern at all and just try to maximise light output whilst making it fairly even. This is a problem because it can make the road and terrain close to the car very bright which is distracting when you're predominantly looking 70-100m up the road when driving at speed.

I have some (now very old) scorpion-LED lights I bought from Dan at Carbon Offroad when they were launched. They're 4" round lights with a single, 100W LED chip in the centre. They don't have anything that looks like a reflector, but they do have a very obvious lens on the front of them. The light shape is very good by LED standards and performance roughly matches the ARB "intensity" 7" lights but they're much smaller. However, in my opinion, they still fall into the trap of of all the LED lights I've seen - too much "spill" light - I.e inconsequential light that's brightly lighting the road directly in front of the car and the trees way above, which is distracting. They're probably be ideal roof mounted where the cabin of the car could be used to "cut" the spill light so the normal headlights fill the area directly in front of the car .

There's another issue with these lights that's a double whammy. Amount of light and its temperature. These lights typically put out so much light that when you dip them for an oncoming vehicle your eyes can't adapt in time and it's dangerously dark on dipped beam alone. I would strongly recommend upgrading your factory wiring headlight loom and running some H4 inserts with quality globes* so there is more light under dipped beam.

The temperature of lots of LED lights is too high - it's too "blue" (we perceive "hotter" light as blue) this very blue light is distracting due to glare and we don't perceive detail as well. 6K looks great flooding the near zone with light but if you're trying to look beyond that near zone out to 100m or so at 100km/h all that glare makes it feel like you're trying to look at someone with the sun behind them. It's hard work and stressful. Reflective road signs are a huge issue too with so much light returning to the driver they can actually be dangerous.

* Note my mention of upgrading the globes, as in Halogen. the vast majority of LED headlight replacement units are poorly designed and/or illegal for road use in Australia. Yes, they're bright, but the shape of the light and temperature are poorly suited to the application for the same reasons they are for driving lights. I have also experimented with quality LED replacements H4 globes and the resulting temperature and pattern is poor. This is true for both a glass H4 insert and a modern plastic headlight (falcon)

[shep]

I reckon KC Hilites are pretty much the best you can buy. Not cheap, but the 20 year warranty means they will last a pretty long time.

Mine is the 8 light bar and they cost between $2k and $3k depending on what mounts you use.