I replaced my sealed beams with the AutoPal replaceable bulb units because they were given to me for free so I thought I might as well give them a try. I had read over and over that they are junk, don't use them, but I never got a reason why.
People say they're junk because…they're junk! They're not actually headlamps, they're headlite-shaped trinkets made in what amounts to a (literally) dirt-floor barn in India. These "headlamps" come complete with fraudulent safety approval markings and all. Their craptacularity (technical term!) is spelled out with pics and data
here (by a non-headlamp-geek, so he notices and documents how much worse the Autopals are and how much better the Cibies and Hellas are, but he's not really aware of how much the difference matters).
I drove it at night a couple times this summer and was very pleased with the lights.
I don't doubt it, but that doesn't mean they're good (or effective, or safe). The difficulty is, what we feel like we're seeing isn't what we're actually seeing. The human visual system is a lousy judge of how well it's doing. "I know what I can see!" seems reasonable, but it doesn't square up with reality because we humans are just not well equipped to accurately evaluate how well or poorly we can see (or how well a headlamp works). Our subjective impressions tend to be very far out of line with objective, real measurements of how well we can (or can't) see, so there are a whole lot of headlamps out there, especially cheap off-brand crapola (including Autopal and Neolite, the other brand from India, a bunch of brands from China, etc) that
feel like "Hey, these are nice headlamps" but are about as adequate for safety as a seatbelt made out of used dental floss. The other side of this coin is that there are plenty of headlamps out there that give at least adequate safety performance, but
feel like they're useless.
The primary factor that drives subjective ratings of headlamps is foreground light, that is light on the road surface close to the vehicle...which is almost irrelevant; it barely even makes it onto the _bottom_ of the list of factors that determine a headlamp's actual safety performance. A moderate amount of foreground light is necessary so we can use our peripheral vision to keep track of the lane lines and keep our focus up the road where it should be, but too much foreground light works against us: it draws our gaze downward even if we consciously try to keep looking far ahead, and the bright pool of light causes our pupils to constrict, which destroys our distance vision. All of this while creating the feeling that we've got "good" lights. It's not because we're lying to ourselves or fooling ourselves or anything like that, it's because our visual systems just don't work the way it feels like they work.
And it's a safety double-whammy because most poor-quality headlamps (including the Autopals) produce just about nothing
but foreground light: a wash of light close to the vehicle, but no concentrated hot spot to throw light down the road where you need it, so you get severely deficient seeing distance.
Also, it's a popular misunderstanding that H4/"E-code"/European/replaceable-bulb headlamps are necessarily better than sealed beams. That's not true. There are good and bad headlamps of every description.
Seriously, you are
way far better off with one of the options in post № 160 of this thread. You can spend more and get more, of course, but either of those options is going to be a giant improvement over what you have now and what you had before.
