Coloured dash bulbs

[superloopy]

Anyone done the full set? About to buy replacement bulbs and fancy a change but not sure what the end result will look like?

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[myglaren]

[Stickyfinger]

The GREEN colour comes from clear bulbs via a clear frame through translucent GREEN plastic .....any colour needs to work with green plastic (filter), none do as you have BOTH colour bulbs and a coloured filter so it just gets darker.

[superloopy]

But has anyone ACTUALLY use coloured bulbs? Theyre more expensive so i'm guessing not.

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[Stickyfinger]

As soon as you see inside you can see it would be pointless, zip all to do with costs.

A light filter does that....filters light.

So ALL light wavelengths other than the filters colour are excluded.....red blue etc, these are all filtered out so will not show.
The only way to change this is to replace the face decal..........

[GiveMeABreak]

I've seen some digital dashes removed on the older Xsara Picasso where the owners thought it would be cool to add some different coloured bulbs and they wondered why everything was darker / dimmer. I've just replaced a load on a relative's Picasso and stuck to the standard clear bulbs - best result IMO.

[superloopy]

So .... all in all not a good idea is what i'm gleaning from the responses [emoji6]

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[elma]

Not really, unless you feel like changing the filter. Not sure how difficult but I expect fiddly at best.

[GiveMeABreak]

A clear bright bulb will allow the most light to penetrate through coloured film - any other colour is already filtered out and will be filtered again by material the remaining light has to go through - as Sticky says. If it is brightness and clarity you want - stick to the originals. On doing the job, you might find that more than a few of the bulbs have already blown, so replacing these with original clear bulbs might return the light to proper levels.

[CitroJim]

I believe some people have tried LED bulbs in a Xantia dash with very disappointing results... White LEDS can be (and are often) anything but when looked at across the spectrum and give (I believe) a lot of blue light. If the light from an LED is effectively stopped by the green filters then the result will be very dim.

Best to stick with what the maker intended; as is so often the case

[Richard_C]

My thoughts on LEDs:

Think of torque curves, but instead of rpm along the bottom of the graph its different frequencies of light.

Natural daylight is a bit like a good old diesel engine, a wide flat spread. A bit more bottom end (red) or top end (blue) as you go through the day, but mostly flat in the visible spectrum.

Incandescent bulbs - good old traditional ones - are a bit like a turbo diesel, more of a peak, usually at the red end, but still a broad spread

A cheap LED is a bit like those 600cc Japanese motorbike engines in the early 70's - loads of torque but only between 7000 and 7001 rpm. A peak with nothing around it. Difference is, clever management allows the designer to put the peak where they want (used to be always blue), but its still a peak.

So - like Jim says if you use LEDS and it happens that the colour film doesn't let your particular light frequency through, you don't get much light, just sort of enhanced darkness.

What follows is general and barely relevant ramble about LED bulbs:

LED designers have got better - some use a cluster of 3, bit like the dots in your colour TV, to synthesize what they want. If you look at domestic LED lighting, there are 3 things to worry about - the output (usually in watts and compared with an incandescent equivalent - so my GU10s above me in my study are 4w, equivalent to 35w halogens), the colour temperature (i.e where the designer has put the peak, typically 2700 ('warm') in a house but up to 6000 ('daylight'), and cri. CRI is a mystery to most because it is rarely put on the packaging. A CRI of one means the designer has done a good job and the 'curve' more or less matches daylight. Many IKEA LED bulbs are very good, typical CRI is 0.81.

Now, to my kitchen. I put in some LED counter lights, dead cheap, too cheap and will change soon. They are warm white - but seem to be low CRI so while the chips and red sauce look fine, the broccoli looks much darker than in daylight because there is not much green in the transmitted spectrum. Our eyes adapt of course, I know that broccoli is green so my brain sees it as green even if my eyes see it as dark green. If you put on pink tint ski goggles, the snow looks pink for about 5 minutes, then your brain overrides - it knows snow is white (except the yellow blobs, never eat yellow snow) so over rides the input from your eyes and adjusts everything.

If you are a photographer or film maker you want studio lights that are the right colour temperature and have a high CRI - that's why they are so expensive.

So back to the OP - originals probably best - why not invest in some pink tint ski goggles

[CitroJim]

Richard, that's a most excellent explanation of the issue Wonderful stuff and the broccoli issustrates the point beautifully!

you don't get much light, just sort of enhanced darkness.

That is priceless

Xantia headlights all over again...

[Zelandeth]

Proper white lamps really are the only way to go with the Xantia I'm afraid. You need good omnidirectional output from the lamps pretty much right across the spectrum, as to properly light the dash you need wideband green, orange and red to all be present.

The actual face of the dials is made of transclucent green tinted plastic with the face printed on, so changing the colour of the filter is a non-starter. The pointers themselves are clear, but the lit material is red, and the km/h scale on the speedo is a pale amber/orange colour.

There are *good quality* warm white LED lamps out there which will probably do the job, provided that they are well designed ones with the right sort of light distribution which should be able to do the job. Most car dashboards though make quite extensive use of light pipes to get the light to where it's needed though, and the function of these relies on the light source being physically exactly where the designer intended...This is quite tricky to ensure with an LED replacement unless you're actually buying the bits and doing it yourself.

I reckon with a modern panel like in the Xantia that your best bet if you really want to go down the LED route is to pull the entire thing apart and do a lot of experimentation.

Oh, and the illumination dimmer won't work most likely after LEDs are fitted either without modification.

Given the price of the incandescent lamps and how long they tend to last (I more than forgive my Xantia needing a few changed in the instrument panel after 200+ thousand miles), I just wouldn't bother. The instrument panel and switchgear illumination in the Xantia is really quite decent when all the lamps are working, and isn't really worth messing with.


I've successfully done LED conversions on two cars - these both used far simpler dash lighting with three larger W5W wedge lamps front-lighting the panel. The first of these was my first Saab 900, as this was the early 2000s when the blue LED craze had just started to take off, and to me they were still new, interesting and exciting things. ...Plus I'd just at the time come across a VW when they had the whole deep blue and red illumination scheme going on, and thought (still do...) that it was one of the coolest looking things I'd ever seen.

In that case I was able to get away with this because the pointers in the Saab are painted fluorescent orange - so they glowed nicely under the deep blue from the LEDs, only thing I really lost visibility wise was the green "econ" marker on the rev counter. Now, changing the rest of the swichgear to be red, that never got finished because it was a horribly fiddly and time consuming job! Would I do it again? Nope!

Second one was on my Lada Niva. It was originally front-lit a very, very slightly cyan-tinted white from the bottom of the panel. The illumination on this one actually seemed to do a far better job of reflecting light off the panel rather than illuminating it, and as the pointers were red, the cyan tint helped to make them disappear.

In this case I ripped the cyan filter out (just a strip of tinted plastic in this case), and replaced the lamps with three Luxeon Star LEDs being driven at a pretty low current - there was enough space inside the panel in this case that I was able to position them in the most optically advantageous location. The result was a very dimly lit dash, but that in full darkness was actually more than adequate - no other lighting to worry about there as nothing else was lit.

[Stickyfinger]

I was pl;aying last night.....with an old KmPh speedo.

You CAN scratch off the green on the back as it is in fact based on white plastic . This has a Grey opaque stencil layer printed on the front leaving all numbers and letters translucent, the translucent Green/Red of the Numbers/Markings is printed on the back of this plastic as well as a black mask layer.

Rather than coloured bulbs the only real option (without stripping the speedo of its needle) is to scrap the numbers and add a translucent filter of your colour choice behind each one.

[Richard_C]

he first of these was my first Saab 900,

I had one of those, an auto. If you pressed 'black panel' only the speedo lit up, but it was clever enough to light up things you need to know like fuel gauge if not much in tank. Rev counter lit up above 5250.

So, being as how the last 10 miles of my trip home was on twisty country roads, and being as how the company paid all my fuel, after a long journey the game was to try and keep the rev counter lit up for all of the 10 miles