LED Tail lights
 

Looking at several options on ebay.

Anyone used either of these? any benefit of these compared to zompkspeed. First 2 look similar, but the description of 2nd says Philips Lumileds.

LED Clear Tail lights

http://d3d71ba2asa5oz.cloudfront.net...300-led-rc.jpg

Red Clear Philips LED Says it uses Philips Lumileds.

http://d3d71ba2asa5oz.cloudfront.net...-led-rc__1.jpg


ZOMK Speed LED - They look kind of dull.

http://d3d71ba2asa5oz.cloudfront.net...-led-rc__1.jpg

I'm probably going to buy these in the next coming days. They look pretty good. Hopefully better in person.

I went with the "smoked" option. They all come from the same factory in China, anyway. Quality is good, almost as good as OEM BMW.

Have yet to install due to other projects going on and it's fricking freezing in this god forsaken state.

i had smoked ones about 5 years ago, they looked good on the black car, but at one point i felt that they looked too "chinese", and when couple of months later one side stopped working, i just took them off and sold them on ebay for about $70... There were too many cars on the road (San Jose, Costa Rica), that had those altezza-style, LED tail lights... I think in 5 years the technology should be much better and the warranty should be good too...

Also, these lights are known to flicker on the start up for the cold monitoring and also continue to flicker while on - supposedly due to adaptive braking on the facelifted E53.

There is a line in the FSW programming file that calls for LED TAILLIGHT ACTIV or NICHT_ACTIV, which hopefully may resolve the flickering issue.

I have the smoked LED from ebay several months ago... NO problems whatsoever. I love them on my black X5.

I've thought about it, but I wish the LEDs looked more OEM, they do look very obviously non factory to me

I disagree. I think they look much better than the OEM ones. I will take some pics of my current smoked ones and post them. They really give an updated look on the X.

here's my argument...when lit up, the LEDs make a generic rectangle instead of filling the housing or making a cool pattern like the E46 M3 OEM ones do. Just doesn't look OEM (when lit)

these are the smoked tail lights that i had on the E34 - they were original HELLA lights, with E stamps (no DOT stamp, if I remember correctly), they had blacked out plastic with the underlying platic color still the same as it was supposed to be - the turn signal was yellow, the brakes were red...

when i was looking for the same set up for the E39 (you can see the left front tire of the E39 on the same picture), there was not anything like that, just the smoked turn signal portion...

And when I ordered the tails for the E53, I was hoping that they would be same as the ones i had on the E34... but.. they were not...

I have just ordered these, will post some pics once fitted. :D

Note the 4 columns of LED's instead of the usual 3.

Click here

http://www.carparts-online.de/Bilder/13879.jpg