1157 Bulb Guide

let’s add to replace one one five seven or RP twenty 5/5 filament bulbs which is this thing here and the way these work they have two contacts at the bottom and two filaments inside that’s what the twenty 1/5 refers to normally would be top-20 1/5 w w s– four watts so one filament is 21 watts and the other is 5 watts and they’re typically used in things like taillight enclosures where you have the low power filament taking care of the taillight functionality and the high power filament taking care of the brake light functionality and that’s just switched on and off will switch between the two modes using the using the dual contacts so 21 was a both both filaments are on by the way when the high power mode is on which makes a total power of maximum power of 26 watts so this is an LED which is intended to replace that I have tried a number of LEDs to do this in the past the the cheaper Chinese ones that are you can get off eBay and Aliexpress and that kind of thing they’re all junk in my experience I haven’t found one is any good yet so now I’m going to try the name-brand so to speak or since Philips do this I like to look at the design I thought I’d give it a go it’s very expensive a lot more expensive than the Chinese ones but you presumably get what you pay for so what are they advertised five times more light whatever that means obviously read 12 year lifetime on the website they guarantee that so I guess it’s a kind of warranty although you know in any eleven years and six months from now then good luck but anyway that they’re clearly optimistic about the durability so that it’s good to see they say road-legal up to sixty degrees operating temperature a vibration resistant which is true of LEDs in general so that’s good 130 lumens now that’s a very difficult measure to compare because these are red and if you’re comparing it to the lumen output of these which is almost certainly higher you need to remember that these will be behind a red filter in use which will cut their effective lumens so not necessarily a comparable figure that let’s open the box up and have a look at the actual them the actual chips so if we compare this side to side we see that you can see how Philips are clearly going for the same sort of form factor there’s this I’m not sure what it is if is the metal coated in something or whether it’s a your ceramic what is the plastic presumably heatsink of some sort because the fins are presumably designed to provide cooling anyway and there are the chips there’s one chip two chips one on each side which are situated as you can see in exactly the same location as the centre of the filament in the original so it’s clearly designed to work with the enclosures the reflectors and the refractors of an existing light enclosure design for this and the these are matters one on each side but this is sort of a wedge orientation you look like that you can see so the light is clear intended to go here and yeah but at the hemisphere where the hemispheres intersect here hopefully there should be a bit of overlap so you don’t get any lack of light around here despite these chips being oriented opposite each other so I will now bring the power supply do a little bit of measuring I have a 12 volt power supply connected to this DMM and I will switch between I’m not sure which is high which is low but we’re about to find out now if it doesn’t work probably I have the priority wrong and with LEDs that matters and these bulbs because of the dual contacts can be expected to be inserted in the correct way around so they don’t need to worry about that I’m any circuitry that could handle that now it’s going to work tada that’s one setting and the aw that’s dimmer so that’s the low light and that is the the high level and so the car when you’re switching from taillight to brake line will be making that switch as you do it now what I wanted to measure on the voltmeter is the power draw and that’s worth talking about now Philips claims the low level power draw is 0.3 watts and the high level power draw is 2 watts which is interesting certainly a lot less than these so you’re talking about some power savings but what I really care about is actually the ratio between the high and a low level because on the cheaper Chinese ones that I’ve tried of these the main problem with their performance wasn’t that they weren’t bright enough but rather that the the difference between the low level and high level was insufficient for example the ratio on the one that I was using most recently was about three or three point two to one that’s to say the high level was only about three times brighter than the low level whereas the ratio on these is closer to five obviously it’s five watts as opposed to twenty six watts right so that’s about one to five so let’s measure now despite what Philips might claim let’s measure the low level now that is drawing 0.02 amps at twelve point zero five volts so that’s drawing 0.24 watts which is quite close to what philips claimed at zero point three watts and the high power is drawing 0.16 amps which is one point nine to one point nine three which again is quite close to the two watts claimed so to calculate the ratio we divide those two numbers is one point one point nine zero eight divided by zero point two four one which is a ratio of exactly 8mm which is a suspiciously round figure so there must be something in the circuitry that’s relevant to that I would guess and that’s that’s incredible that’s really good considering the filament bulb is five where it was significantly above that so hopefully the low-level light will be a you know sensible tail that sort of level of luminosity and then the brake light when it kicks in will be eight times that in terms of its values which means it’s really going to really going to get people’s attention okay one remaining thing to do we will have a look at what the pattern of the light looks like if I hold that vertically and then we introduce the testing bubble I have here then we can see how the light is being distributed by the light by the bowl and as you can see with the exception of a very subtle shadow at the lower edges it really gives a very um a very good even distribution of light not really any hotspots of any notes yeah I think that’s pretty good it’s going to emulate a filament bulb fairly well so we’ll go put this bulb in a car in order to demonstrate it working it just goes in the same way as the old filament style bulb obviously with a twist and spring action so here’s the low and high modes in response to the brake pedal all working as you would expect and here it is behind the lens looking at just the outer right-hand segment here as there are other other two other bulbs completing the ring that are irrelevant for this particular review and here’s a shot directly from the back of the car with the taillights on and the brake being actioned and again ignore the inner segments of the taillights so the philips LED is on the right and the filament the old filament bulb is on the left so notice how the Philips is noticeably brighter in both low and high modes and here is a still photograph this is showing just the taillights on so just the low mode for the brake lights and here is a shot showing just the brake lights on the taillights off so you can see the direct comparison between the new and the old and here’s the Bob gain just of the camera moving through varying angles from you know looking at the reflector lens and I’d say those shadows that were visible on the bowl are actually noticeable here as there’s a dark spot at the meeting of the hemispheres of the two chips so it’s not 100% reproducing the light pattern from a filament bulb but it is very close and I’m not going to deduct too many points so to speak for this I think it’s perfectly acceptable so this is a positive review very little to criticize and we can say it certainly does its job of replacing the filament version and in return for the admittedly high price you get a very long lifetime or at least a very long guaranteed lifetime and a very good performance in terms of both light and super low power usage so although put the links to purchase this below for anybody who’s interested otherwise everybody have fun out there