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HID's seem to penetrate better, because of the more concentrated source of light, at least to human eyes. LED's will save you a little power, especially if you aren't trying for white light (blue or blue green, mono-, di-, or tri-chromatic). However you are going to need a pretty big wire to power a big array, which is what you will need.The array will be slightly larger with LED's, and if you want a wide diffusion rather than a light with a narrow cone of diffusion you will need diffusion optics on the LED's, which looses as much as 20% of the power.
The failure mode is also important, with LED's you have the individual diodes blink out one by one, with an average lifespan of 25,000 hours, and a standard deviation of 4-5,000 hours in overdriven systems, like you would put on a boat, HID lamps slowly fade over the first 2500 hours, settling out between 60-80% intensity depending on what is actually in the lamp and tend to die at about 10,000 hours, however other components in the system can fail, the electronics involved in running LED's are a whole lot cheaper than those for HID's, but thats manufacturing cost not retail cost.
If you want a whole lot of blue or red or bluegreen lights on your boat LED's are probably the answer, if you just want one or two white(ish) lights then go with HID, LED's still need a few years to be more economical.
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