Car Headlights are one of the most essential parts of the car when driving down a dark and dingy road. Headlights help you navigate the road at night and improve visibility in bad weather conditions. Suffice it to say, having properly functioning headlights is vital to your safety on the road. A failing headlight should be fixed as soon as possible to keep your vehicle both legal and safe.
Headlight technology has come a long way from Carbide lamps used in the early days of cars to laser lights of the modern era. If you’re looking for a replacement or an upgrade, in this article we discuss the different types of headlights available on the market today.
There are seven different types of headlights and headlight bulbs are used:
Reflector headlights were the standard headlights that were present in all vehicles till 1985. These are still the most common types of headlights that you will see. The bulb in a reflector headlight is encased in a bowl-like case. The bowl-like case has mirrors installed that reflect the light onto the road.
These headlights that were found in older cars had a fixed casing. This meant that in case the bulb burned out, it could not be replaced, and the entire headlight case had to be changed. These reflector headlights were also known as the sealed beam headlights. In sealed beam headlights, there was a lens in front of the headlight which determined the shape of the beam of the light that was produced by them.
However, newer reflector headlights come with mirrors inside the housing instead of a lens. These mirrors are used to guide the beam of light. With this technological improvement, there is no need to have a sealed headlight housing and bulb. It also means that the bulbs can be replaced easily when they burn out.
Pros of Reflector Headlights
Cons of Reflector Headlights
With improvements in technology in the headlight industry, headlights got better. Projector headlights are a newer type of headlight that was first used in the 1980s in luxury cars only. However, today, projector headlights have become quite common, and most of the newer models of cars come equipped with these types of headlights.
Projector headlights are quite similar to reflector headlights in terms of assembly. These headlights also consist of a bulb that is enclosed in a steel case that has mirrors. These mirrors act as reflectors, just like they do in reflector headlights. The only difference is that projector headlights have a lens that works like a magnifying glass. It increases the brightness of the beam of light, and hence, projector headlights produce better illumination.
To make sure that the angle of the light beam produced by projector headlights is correct, they come with a cutoff shield. It is due to the presence of this cutoff shield that projector headlights have a very sharp cutoff.
Pros of Projector Headlights
Cons of Projector Headlights
If you wish to upgrade the headlight system of your car, H4 conversions are a cost-effective way of doing so. It uses the standard reflector-type housing, but instead of a sealed case, they use an H4 dual filament type bulb that can be replaced.
This means that if your bulb gets burned out, you don’t have to get the entire casing replaced. You can simply replace the bulb and be on the road again in no time (or as long as it takes your mechanic to replace the bulb). This also opens up the possibility of using brighter bulbs like LEDs or HIDs.
Since H4 conversions are a standard reflector-type, the light beam they produce is uneven with hot-spotting, a scattered light output, and possible blinding of oncoming traffic.
Headlights are divided into two types on the basis of the number of bulbs housed in the headlight housing.
Quad headlights and non-quad headlights are not interchangeable because the wiring inside is specific to each type. If your vehicle has quad headlights, that’s what you can replace your headlights with. The same is the case with non-quad headlights.
Halogen lights contain a filament or a pair of filaments on single bulbs that provide both bright and dim headlamp function, but there is pressurized gas rather than a vacuum within the bulb.
The bulb filaments are tungsten and the glass envelope is pressurized with inert gas and a small amount of chemically reactive halogen gas, usually, iodine or bromine, which allows halogen bulbs to burn brighter and longer without blackening the inside of the bulb. Some halogen bulbs have a blue coating to make them appear brighter than they are.
Most modern headlights use halogen bulbs. Some sealed beam replacements for older vehicles with glass even have halogen capsules built into the glass sealed beam casing rather than the original type of filament.
If one of those earlier sealed beam units gets breached by a rock, the vacuum within the sealed beam lamp will be lost and those old-style filaments will oxidize and burn out almost immediately. With the halogen capsule providing the light, a small rock hole in the lens facing doesn’t matter.
LED (Light-Emitting Diode) headlight bulbs illuminate by a long fancy term called electroluminescence, which basically means electrons are fired towards positively charged holes in a semiconductor, thus they release energy as photons, which are particles of light.
The same technology is now prevalent on dashboard lights and screen consoles. LED lights have also been used for indicator lights on appliances, bright flashlights, as well as a growing number of vehicle stop lamps, tail lamps, interior lamps, and home lighting. In other words, LED lights are used just about everywhere these days.
Xenon, otherwise known as High-Intensity Discharge or HID lights, is a type of headlight that is commonly installed on higher-end vehicles. These headlights contain a combination of xenon and argon gases mixed with vaporized metals that emit an extremely bright light. There are conversion kits available from some aftermarket sources to upgrade to Xenon/HID headlights.
Laser headlights are a recent innovation in automotive lighting technology. These lights illuminate through the process of chemiluminescence, which means they produce light by triggering a chemical reaction.
Laser beams are shot through a chamber which causes the phosphorus gas inside to glow. What you see in front of your vehicle is the light coming from the gas, and not the laser beams themselves.
In other words, within the headlight unit, the lasers shine onto mirrors that reflect onto a lens filled with a special gas to create a strong light beam.
