Thread: My old Cibie Super Oscars - too yellow

The CRI ( Colour rendering index ) of the old halogens would be around 3000k which is why they look yellow compared to the LED's.

If you have a decent quality light bar, the CRI will be around 5000- 5700k, so you can find globes like that to suit your old spotties. ( H1's, H4's etc )

The cheaper poor quality LED spots tend to be 6000k plus ( kings etc ) and scatter light which also reflects harshly off the road signs, but they try to compensate by advertising that you could read a newspaper at 5 kilometres or whatever.

40 years ago when Super Oscars were king, what advice would you have given to someone who wanted to fit a set of 1943 driving lights to their 1983 car?
I found a use for all my once-treasured dinosaur driving lights:
old driving lights.jpg

Originally Posted by discorevy

The CRI ( Colour rendering index ) of the old halogens would be around 3000k which is why they look yellow compared to the LED's.

If you have a decent quality light bar, the CRI will be around 5000- 5700k, so you can find globes like that to suit your old spotties. ( H1's, H4's etc )

The cheaper poor quality LED spots tend to be 6000k plus ( kings etc ) and scatter light which also reflects harshly off the road signs, but they try to compensate by advertising that you could read a newspaper at 5 kilometres or whatever.

Very sensible response thanks. Maybe the globes I bought recently for the Cibie's were not the optimum choice. The light is nowhere near as white as I remember the output to be when I first bought them, so I'l follow your lead and look for globes with higher K values

Originally Posted by POD

what advice would you have given to someone who wanted to fit a set of 1943 driving lights to their 1983 car?

Probably tell you that we won, and you can take these off now

After some investigation and trying various led lights I eventually refitted my Super Oscars to my car. I was looking for long distance lighting of roadside, and stayed with the driving light pattern lenses rather than the spots due to better spread. In place of the 100w globes I added 55w 4300 HIDs. They pi-- all over some of the very expensive LEDs I tried, and cost less than $100 for the Aussie kit.

Oscars were great lights. They have an excellent parabolic reflector and the correct globes sit in the focal sweet spot. There are LED kits for them, but I wouldn't bother. Never tried the HID kits. Do they warm up quickly enough?

You will pay mega $$ to equal them.

I've had Oscars, Super Oscars, 'Bull' lights plus a myriad lesser driving lights over the years. My wife got one of the last Falcons as a company car and the standard headlamps eclipsed anything I had ever had, in both output and distribution of light. I stopped faffing about with historic lights after that, despite the nostalgic attachment.

Do they warm up quickly enough?

Initial turn on takes a couple of seconds to be at max brightness, but from then on, seems pretty much immediate when you flick them back on after dipping for oncoming vehicles etc.