Instead of ruin other drivers vision, I have thought about attaching 2 PIAA lights to the bull bar on the front of the 100 series I have...anyone have an opinion on these or a recommendation on anything they have used to flood the road with light. Not really interested in a bar of lights, but who knows..many thanks in advance
#5772 - PIAA LP570 LED White Long Range Driving Beam Kit
www.piaa.com
Not really sure what you mean when you say that "Instead of ruin other drivers vision, I have thought about attaching 2 PIAA lights to the bull bar on the front of the 100 series I have." The effect of your lights on others is not influenced by what brand name is on your lights. It is the type of light, the type of focus that it has which determines that. And if you want to "flood the road with light"... then you are going to ruin the other drivers vision.
You can't have it both ways.
You can use a light with a well defined horizontal cutoff (basically a "low beam") to keep the focus of the light (and as much side scatter as possible) out of the eyes of oncoming drivers. No matter how much light you put in front of you with this approach it will always be suitable only for close in use and low speeds. If it is properly made , the vast majority of the light will only reach forward to where the cutoff meets the ground. No matter how bright they light is within it's coverage area, in order to not impact oncoming drivers, it is impossible to aim the light high enough to reach more than a couple of hundred feet ahead. At most.
Modern projector lowbeams are very good at this. But they are so good, that there is no real illumination above the cutoff, making them exceptionally unsuitable for high speed use.
You can use a light which is broadly focused with no cutoff, to light up everything in front of you with as broad as 180* coverage in every direction. Lights like this will illuminate the road up ahead of you, the ditches and the ground and the trees. Everything. Good stuff if you are not worrying about oncoming traffic. Great on the trail. Still not always perfect on the road since, no matter how much insane energy you might put out there, the dispersion of the light weakens it pretty fast as the distance increases. With enough power and a bit of center weighting to put more of the light straight ahead this can be very very very good on the road as well as pretty darn good on tighter trails too. But again, not good for oncoming traffic. At all. If they are powerful enough to be what you are wanting your auxiliary lights to be, they will be far far far worse than your highbeams in everyone else's eyes.
You can use a light with a very tight focus straight down the road. Even some of the higher quality old school stuff could achieve a pretty tight focus. With modern tech (particularly the laser stimulated chip approach) can focus as tight a 1*... with is really too tight for almost all uses. In any case, a good tightly focused light can put almost all the photons way down the road. Useless at low speed or on twistier roads, but on a deep dark middle of the night high speed cruise down the open highway, these are great for seeing the deer, cow, elk, moose (drunkards or tweakers too) waiting way up the road to step in front of you.
Circling back to the second type I mention here, a decent quality, high power unit with a broad secondary focus and a good degree of center weighting to the pattern will give all the close in wide coverage lighting that anyone will need while driving and also push enough down the road to satisfy 90% of any realistic needs for most of us. I have a set on one of my 80s that provides very very good illumination out to 200 yards or so and still enough at 300 yards to be a very positive addition. As well as a full 180* in every direction to keep the close in stuff extremely well lit. (These are very similar to the ARB Intensity lights with *maybe* a bit less center weighting.) The biggest downside of this specific set, and others like it, is that the midrange illumination is so strong that your eyes adjust to that level of brightness, and trying to peer into the darkness beyond it can be a bit tough sometimes.
Which is why a set of tightly focused lights to increase the extreme distance illumination is the perfect combination. (Laser laser laser!
)
Ideally, a combination of a quality pair of each of these types will give you all the light you need in any situation.
But no one light can't do everything. A light that will not impact oncoming drivers can never give you the light you need for higher speed or longer distance and probably not illuminate the ditches and everything off to the sides very well either. And it's not about brand name. Brand name really does not matter so long as the quality is there and the design is right.
Once you settle on what you want for lights, then look at mounting location a bit too.
Mark...
