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Have a look at Nacho Offroad Lighting - https://www.nachooffroadtechnology.com/
Virtually every light out there that does not specifically say that it is made in Japan or Taiwan is made in China. In the same factories that churn out all sorts of cheap ass crap along with some pretty good stuff. Generally speaking Japanese lights are great stuff. And the stuff made in Taiwan is in the same class.
My point is... These days, buying any light American branded because it has a pricey name without looking at the specs is probably not the best approach.
I don't have a lot of experience with European manufactured lights any more. If you do go that route, make sure that European brand is not just Euro branded Chinese stuff too.
With a little searching you can often find the same lights that are sold for waaaay too much money under a boutique cool kid brand, quietly sold out the back door of the Chinese factory for a fraction of the price. Or Chinese branded equivalent lights that are proudly sold under their own name... still a lot cheaper. You can also do what a lot of the boutique brands do and get the Chinese factory to make your lights for you and/or just put your name on the box if you buy then in batches of 500 or more.
Of course you can also find cheap knockoffs of ANY of the better lights. Some of the Chinese manufacturers even offer down market versions of their higher quality lights to vendors who are pitching to a more... shall we say... frugal customer, who usually has no idea of how much better the more expensive light is. Amazon and Aliexpress are full of these.
There are even supper s***ty Chinese counterfeits of the decent Chinese brands out there!.
Of course... it can be tough to really get a feel for how any light is made, what the real quality is and the actual light that it puts out if you can not hold it, hook it up and test it.
Paying attention to what others have to say is worthwhile. But realize that a lot of people are gonna throw out some pretty strong opinions based on very limited experience with after market lights. Even with the ones that they have purchased. I have seen a lot of guys raving about how great their lights are and when I actually see them I just have to keep my mouth shut and nod my head and try to look impressed.
Also... you mention the size of the light that you want and the bumper you want to put it in. But you said nothing about what you want the light to do for you. This is really the first step.
Do you want Halogen, HID or LED lights? Projector or reflector? Do you want wide pattern fog light with a razor sharp cutoff? Or would your prefer fuzzier edges? Do you want an extreme long range pencil beam with 1 or 2 degree spread? Do you want broad short range illumination for the trails? Do you want good wide midrange lighting with decent center weighting to supplement your high beams? Do you want a high/low beam combo to help with headlight shortcomings? Cold white, warm white or yellow? Switchable yellow and white? Do you not really care so long as it looks cool to all the soccer dads as you drop the kids off at school?
Soooo many choices.
Mark...
Thanks, I'm feeling like these might work and not crush my budget:Nothing simplistic about that. Just straightforward realistic expectations.
You can't ask any light to do everything. But what you are looking to find is pretty easy to accomplish.
These days LED has pretty much eclipsed all the other tech out there. Halogen makes more heat than it does light. HID is better but at this point it really offers nothing that LED does not and the HID offerings are limited to say the least. Plus with LED if you want more output you can simply add emitters to the unit more until you get the desired level. Not as easy to do with HID unless you actually add additional "lights".
Laser Stimulated Chip beats all the other tech, but it seems that market interest has never really picked up and there are not a lot of LSP lights out there and they are all long range "pencil beams".
So... IMHO you want LED. you do not need projectors unless you are going for a fog light pattern or a "low beam" with razor sharp horizontal cut off (which it does not sound like you are)
LED reflector is where you are at now then. Some of the newer LED reflector style lights have teen tiny "projector like" lenses over each of the individual emitters. With the inherent 120-140 degree forward cast of the LED emitters, these work well to get a tighter focus than reflectors by themselves.
My personal experience is that for a good medium range light with lots of side scatter to light up the ditches and whatever else might be off to the side as well as pushing decently forward down the road notably further than your high beams, plain old LED reflector designs work well, are plentiful and inexpensive.
To accomplish the goal that you mention I have been perfectly satisfied with lights like these
These type lights are almost always varying numbers (depending on the size of the housing) of 5 watt emitters with reflectors and no auxiliary lensing. The wider lighting is basically "side scatter" due to the inability of this approach to achieve real narrow focusing. They still have a hot spot in the center to throw a more light straight ahead and the end result is usually pretty decent close, mid and sometimes even longish range lighting all in one light.
I am running a pair on one of my rigs that basically turns the world in front of me into daylight well beyond even what I need for reaction time at 75 MPH when a moose is in the road out in the pitch black. And they also throw a full 180 degree spread. But... they are a bit over 9 inches in diameter with 45 emitters each and pull an honest 215-220 watts of power EACH.
There are also some out there using multiple (but obviously fewer) 10 watt emitters. Usually with some sort of auxiliary lensing over each emitter. These tend to focus down the road better, but usually toss less to the sides. If this is better or worse depends on what you want and need. I used to prioritize long reach into the night over lighting up off to the sides as much. But at some point... sometime after hitting a couple of different moose and dodging many many more... I realized that those bastards sometimes wait in the ditch to jump out in front of you rather than just planting themselves on the centerline a mile ahead and waiting.
The 3-4 inch restriction to fit in your bumper limits you a bit in terms of just how much light you can put out there. Try to get something with the highest number of emitters in whatever size light you get.
Avoid fluted lenses/covers. You can get all the spread that you need with clear lenses and you lose less light to the lens that way.
Do not pay too much attention to whatever claim of wattage anyone might toss out for their LED lights. *Almost* every one selling lights is either out and out lying, or carefully distorting these numbers. And if anyone claims that their offering of xx watts is making significantly more light than any other unit of xx watts. Don't believe it. If they claim some sort of different tech, with weird acronyms and abbreviations and terms no one else is using... without explaining any of it... It's probably bull****. The Chinese vendors are not really any worse than the American vendors about this, but they are more shameless and funnier when you try to read it.
Avoid the cheapest of the cheap on Amazon and Aliexpress. Some of the cheap junk looks exactly like the better stuff until you hold it in your hands, or even open it up.
*Personally* I avoid the boutique vendors as well for the most part. Not at all saying that some of that stuff is not amazing. But for what it sounds like you are looking for, you can save a lot of money and still most likely surpass your needs and expectations with lights in the mid tier price zone.
Mark...
Looks like 15 emitters. 3 on each side dedicated primarily to off centerline illumination. I am not sure that they would not have been better served to simply eliminate the deep reflectors and let all 15 shine forward and spill to the sides naturally (they brag about a 140* spread... but that it the default spread for a bare emitter anyway). Those reflectors take up a lot of the room in that light. eliminating them would allow for more emitters/more output.
Here's what I have on the front of my LC .
I did not even know that the Blazer branding was still around. I have a soft spot in my heart for those old stalwarts. I see that these are made in Taiwan too. Probably always were I guess. I Love that look on a '40. But I am too much of a function over form guy and I just can not do the heat over light trade off of the halogens anymore.
or whatever oobleck is falling out of the air off of the windshield and wipers long before I need to clear the lights. Although... as I think about it... since I finally got the heater in my primary rig back to the proper "cook you out of the cab" status... this is not as big of an issue anymore. Not in this rig anyway.
