Has anyone tried running HID or LED bulbs in the Cibie housings?

I'm currently running hella e-codes with halogen bulbs, but thinking about a led bulb upgrade. diode dynamics is in earth city, might be worth a shot

Yes. I'm running the Cibie 82440 light unit with HID and the beam pattern is not quite uniform. It does have a flat cut off so no blinding on coming traffic. Street and highway signs light up tremendously and compared with factory HID or LED headlights, this is much better for sign illumination. The only thing is the bulb is not optimized for this reflector / lens design and it has dark spots in the near field. No experience with LED bulbs in this lens.

Yeah, I'm asking as I'm currently running the Cibie's with Philips halogens in them and I'm wondering how HID's or LED's would work in the same housing. I know there's concerns about where on the bulb the light originates and which direction it's projected in to allow for the reflector to catch the light the most effectively.

Which is why you should not be running that bulb in that housing. It is designed for an H4 bulb only. The dark spots are because the filament is not in the correct space for the optics of the lamp.

The Cibie lens was designed for halogen and will work best with a halogen bulb. You might want to try some of the high output halogen bulbs by Phillips and see how that works.

For HID or LED bulbs, it will be less than optimal as the light source point of origination will be different than halogen and you will get uneven light pattern. As I mentioned, with a HID bulb, there is a dark spot in the near field but that doesn't bother me as much since I've gained significant light output to the side for roadside sign illumination.

Of course. That was what I expected going into this experiment. Never the less, short of building my own custom HID lens assembly, this current light pattern with the Cibie unit meets my objective. This combination is significantly brighter than what Jeep puts on the JLs and JTs with their projector LEDs. The factory projector LEDs have a uniform beam pattern but they do not light up road signs very well. I've driven with the factory projector LEDs and they don't even come close even with the shortcoming that I mentioned above.

Because the road signs are above the cutoff. A proper H4 pattern is horizontal to the left and angles up to the right to provide illumination to road signs.

Yes. Of course! Just want to point that out to the community as many think just because the headlight is LED or HID or the lens is projector that the beam pattern is great down the road. The US has not caught up to European lighting standards.

And in Europe, overhead road signs are all lighted. It would be nice. US regs require a certain amount of the light to go up on low beam for that reason.