Conclusion

Despite their many differences, all of these lights are excellent products. All provide enormous amounts of light to improve driving safety at night, and I suspect anyone would be happy with any of them.

From the time I installed them, I was very impressed by the standard Fyrlyts. They were -until now- the brightest driving lights I'd owned. Certainly sufficient for most users, and I would have been happy to continue using them had the offer of the Nemesis not come along. At less than half the price of quality LEDs or HIDs, there’s no light that offers this sort of quality and performance for the money.

However, both the Nemesis and the LED215 are certainly brighter in comparative testing, as you can see for yourself in the images and the video of the testing above. Separating these two is more difficult, particularly because of the differences in colour temperature. The Nemesis produce noticeably more light at almost every point in your field of view. Although the LED215s deliver slightly more light at the very wide end, and there's a smoother falloff to the edges.

I personally prefer the warmer light from both sets of Fyrlyts over the cool/blue light from the LED215s, but that is mostly personal preference. It's worth noting though, that the bluer LED lights exhibit much more visible reflection from fog/smoke than the warmer halogens. This effect can be clearly seen by comparing the Nemesis and LED215 scene photos above. Although taken within a few minutes of each other, the tiny amount of ambient smoke in the air can be barely seen in the Nemesis picture, but is very noticeable in the LED215 shot, substantially reducing the contrast in the image. There's a reason why fog lights are often warm/yellow in colour!

The real elephant in the room for the comparison is pricing. It's a factor that cannot be ignored. At the time of writing, the Fyrlyt 5000s cost $600, the Nemesis 9000s will set you back $990 and the LED215s cost a very substantial $1400 a pair. Once these price differences are factored in, for most users I think it's very hard to go past the standard Fyrlyts given their substantial cost advantage over both of the others.

For drivers who really need the ultimate in lighting performance..... While the LED215s are probably the brightest LED light on the market, the fact remains that they cost over $400 more than the Nemesis, but still can't quite match them for performance, according to my testing. Despite relying on 'old' halogen technology, when it comes to what really counts -real world performance- the Nemesis 9000s finish at the top of this comparison, and leave a substantial amount of change in your pocket to boot.

If you really want to spend an extra $400 or enjoy offroad work after dark, then a combination of Nemesis lights for the highway and a pair of Lightforce’s excellent new 6” single row LED lightbars on the bullbar wings (aimed at an outward angle) would deliver substantially better lighting under every situation than you’d get from LED215s alone, for about the same total cost.