[busterbrown]

Mike,
Are your Halogen low beams in reflector housings or projector housings? Most likely a projector housing as you have a LTZ trim line...but I'm not personally familiar with headlight options on GM trucks.

My 17 Ram has the "premium" factory halogen projector housings. The same complaints over on several Ram owners forums, poor light output.

So I did what everyone recommended...upgrade the halogen bulbs to HID bulbs and ballasts. This was the first vehicle I ever had to upgrade the headlight bulbs on as the light output was that bad. Boy, what a difference. And not a subtle difference. I complimented the low beams with LED bulbs in the fogs and my truck now is safe driving at night.

I do have to point out that HIDs should only be used in projector style housings as a cutoff exists to prevent blinding oncoming traffic. Halogen reflective style housings do not provide a cutoff and will scatter the light above "hood level" into the eyes of other drivers.

LED bulbs are even more sensitive in existing non-LED headlight housings and tend not to be effective at casting the light properly. OEM LED housings are engineered to the exact specs and demands of LED bulbs. In the Ram projector housings, LEDs cast a halo in the center of the light trajectory causing dark areas in the middle. Almost every RAm owner who upgrades to LED bulbs in their low beams ultimately revert back to halogen or bite the bullet and install HIDs. It's really difficult to retrofit an existing halogen housing to LED.

However, LED bulbs are fantastic as road/fog lights since the light output is directed downwards and out to the sides, never causing a blinding scenario.

Worth mentioning too is color temperature (kelvins) that can help with light output. OEM Halogen bulbs are yellowish around 3500K. Lower Kelvin color temp bulbs provide a greater amount of visible light down the road. They're just not very 'modern' looking. I went up a degree on the scale to get a true white light at 5000K. Anything higher than 6000 Kelvin gets into the blues and purples that I personally detest.

The other option for a bulb replacement is to upgrade to a higher wattage halogen bulb...like Sylvania Silverstar Ultras. Unfortunately, the bulb life is significantly reduced to do the higher wattage and taxed filament. I had a set that lasted 1.5 years in a Buick Rainier that I owned. At $45 per set, it wasn't something that I wanted to reinvest in. They do produce noticeably better output though. But nothing like high intensity discharge bulbs.