SupraGuy
Well-Known Member
So I've been going over all of the lights on my Accord, and am having trouble with headlights.
Sure, 9005/9006 lamps aren't exactly rare, but it seems that ones that aren't "high colour temperature" are. I don't want anything with much higher a colour temperature than maybe 3800K. It seems that 5000K is the new norm. I despise it. I don't WANT "whiter" lights, I want ones that are useful.
The human eye is pretty easily fooled. The "whiter" light looks nicer for everything that the beam falls on in nice, clear conditions, but it's deceiving. You can't actually see better. Maybe you're more capable of discerning the difference between "Raspberry pearl" and "Chrysler red" on that car ahead of you, but you cannot actually see better just because the light is closer to daylight, since it's not really daylight out there.
Higher colour temperature is basically more blue light. Sometimes this even comes at a cost of less overall light by filtering out light that isn't blue. This is generally a bad idea for night time, for a few reasons:
1. it actually hurts your night vision. The pupil doesn't react to all light equally. People who need their night vision use red lights to read maps because the red light does not cause the pupil to contract, leaving the eye able to catch more light once the light is turned off. Blue light affects pupil constriction the most, so the more of it you project, the more light you need in order to be able to see as well. This might be fine for the area inside the actual light beam, but it kind of sucks for the sides of the road where there may be animals and pedestrians who may come out onto the road in front of you.
2. It diffuses, refracts and reflects more easily. This means that it's terrible in the fog, rain or snow as it will reflect back at you, making you less able to see what's on the other side of the fog, rain or snow. This also means that it's more likely to blind oncoming drivers as it's more difficult to keep within the beam pattern. You probably already know that many European style fog lights are amber, which is exactly for this reason. (Here's an experiment for you. At night, look for a neon sign that has red and blue in it. At a distance, like across the street, take a good look at it, and see if you can bring the blue into really sharp focus with your eyes. You should be able to do it with the red fairly easily, but probably not so much with the blue. This is in part because of rayleigh scattering, and in part because of the eye's nighttime reaction to blue.)
On a show car, those whiter lights do look nice. That "HID" look does add a certain sharpness to the looks of the car. I know people insist that they can see better, but objective measurement doesn't bear this out. I'm not looking for the Accord to be a show car, it's my daily driver, and I want my lights to help me see at night. To that end, if I'm going to replace my headlights, I want ones that are most likely to achieve that.
So yeah... Those "HID Blue" headlights are a pet peeve of mine. HID conversion kits in standard housings aren't much better, and worse in the case where the car loses the ability to have high/low beams, and the beam pattern is screwed up because the reflector doesn't work with them. I hate seeing them in oncoming traffic, or behind me on the freeway.
Anyway, I'm sure that I'll find good regular lights. It's just more work than it should be.
Sure, 9005/9006 lamps aren't exactly rare, but it seems that ones that aren't "high colour temperature" are. I don't want anything with much higher a colour temperature than maybe 3800K. It seems that 5000K is the new norm. I despise it. I don't WANT "whiter" lights, I want ones that are useful.
The human eye is pretty easily fooled. The "whiter" light looks nicer for everything that the beam falls on in nice, clear conditions, but it's deceiving. You can't actually see better. Maybe you're more capable of discerning the difference between "Raspberry pearl" and "Chrysler red" on that car ahead of you, but you cannot actually see better just because the light is closer to daylight, since it's not really daylight out there.
Higher colour temperature is basically more blue light. Sometimes this even comes at a cost of less overall light by filtering out light that isn't blue. This is generally a bad idea for night time, for a few reasons:
1. it actually hurts your night vision. The pupil doesn't react to all light equally. People who need their night vision use red lights to read maps because the red light does not cause the pupil to contract, leaving the eye able to catch more light once the light is turned off. Blue light affects pupil constriction the most, so the more of it you project, the more light you need in order to be able to see as well. This might be fine for the area inside the actual light beam, but it kind of sucks for the sides of the road where there may be animals and pedestrians who may come out onto the road in front of you.
2. It diffuses, refracts and reflects more easily. This means that it's terrible in the fog, rain or snow as it will reflect back at you, making you less able to see what's on the other side of the fog, rain or snow. This also means that it's more likely to blind oncoming drivers as it's more difficult to keep within the beam pattern. You probably already know that many European style fog lights are amber, which is exactly for this reason. (Here's an experiment for you. At night, look for a neon sign that has red and blue in it. At a distance, like across the street, take a good look at it, and see if you can bring the blue into really sharp focus with your eyes. You should be able to do it with the red fairly easily, but probably not so much with the blue. This is in part because of rayleigh scattering, and in part because of the eye's nighttime reaction to blue.)
On a show car, those whiter lights do look nice. That "HID" look does add a certain sharpness to the looks of the car. I know people insist that they can see better, but objective measurement doesn't bear this out. I'm not looking for the Accord to be a show car, it's my daily driver, and I want my lights to help me see at night. To that end, if I'm going to replace my headlights, I want ones that are most likely to achieve that.
So yeah... Those "HID Blue" headlights are a pet peeve of mine. HID conversion kits in standard housings aren't much better, and worse in the case where the car loses the ability to have high/low beams, and the beam pattern is screwed up because the reflector doesn't work with them. I hate seeing them in oncoming traffic, or behind me on the freeway.
Anyway, I'm sure that I'll find good regular lights. It's just more work than it should be.