I'm going to have to disagree a little with your LED statement.
I hate HIDs since they glare like hell in reflector housings, but they are awesome with projectors.
As for the LED. Click the link to the ones I showed you, they aren't the cheap LEDs with 5 on the bulb.
These are a single LED, the is aimed upwards, and seems to be aimed at the exact location of the 9007 low beam filament.
Upon switching to high beams, it moves the entire bulb to aim the LED at the High beam section of the reflector.
I feel as though these wouldn't glare as much, since the placement of the LED seems about right.
Sticking gimmick HID bulbs in a projector housing
designed for halogen bulbs gives the
illusion of being "awesome" because projectors have a sharper cutoff than regular reflector housings (especially those with fluted lenses). While they might be slightly less terrible, they are still poor compared to sticking the proper bulb into the proper housing
designed for it.
The thing really worth noting is that it is
against the law to put on an HID kit and stick HID bulbs into a housing that is designed for halogen bulbs.
I've looked at the "HID" bulb, it doesn't matter
how the LED is aimed -
it's not a point source. The LED is a large dot of light, many, many times larger than the tiny, tiny, tiny point source of a filament. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. The much, much larger source of light acting as a source for the reflector might give a beam of light, but it will be unfocused, and probably closer to an uneven blob of light in front of the vehicle, rather than a bright, focused, clear beam of light that is aimed on the ground.
That's pretty cool if the LED mount rotates so it can aim at different parts of the reflector, but it doesn't get around the basic problem, that the LED isn't small enough to be a point source and work with the reflector as designed.
As for "
The placement of the LED seems about right" - the placement of a halogen filament has to be
just about perfect with respect to the reflector to get an even, focused beam that the reflector is designed for, with the correct amount of throw to the sides and out in front. Merely being off by a
millimeter can change the beam from being perfectly focused, to being off more than enough to cause glare or just shift the beam in the opposite direction.
To have a big, large LED the size of 25-50+ filaments in place of a single filament be "about the right size" is like saying a tree is "about the right size" to hit a target instead of an arrow. It'll hit it all right, but it ignores the precision inherent in the design and the desired precision in the outcome. You can get a big, giant blob of unfocused light by sticking a bulb in front of a reflector, sure, if you want to just have light go everywhere and use them off-road. The
whole point of automotive headlights is to have a
precise, focused beam that
aims down on the road in front of the vehicle, both because it's the most efficient use of the available light, and so they can be used
without blinding other drivers.
Those LED "bulbs", just like the "HID" bulbs, are total crap, just junk made in China to be sold to idiots all over the world who don't understand basic physics and optics and think automotive lighting works on wishful thinking.
