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Originally Posted by Burnes
I can't find any good H11's(other than standard), does anyone have any links or brands of some good ones to buy?
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Don't waste your money. There are no better Halogen lights than OEM. I bought into the hype and noticed right away how bad the PIAA's were. Then tonight I found this fantastic article discussing how light works and why the "whiter bluer" lights are so inferior.
"First off, full disclosure, this is DS of DS Lighting writing. I have worked very hard for many years to build and maintain my reputation for giving straight facts on automotive lighting, whether or not those facts generate any sales or popularity for me. I'm not the world's only source for automotive lighting devices and bulbs—though I do have a lot of stuff that's nearly impossible to find elsewhere—and I don't need any particular sale to keep food in my fridge, which affords me the formidable luxury of my position: I get to use my knowledge, experience and affiliations to help improve the general body of knowledge on the topic, and thus to give people the greatest possible opportunity to maximize the safety performance of their vehicles' lighting systems...because I like doing it!
You have stated that you prefer your PIAA Xtremewhite Plus bulbs, which have a blue/purple tint to the glass, to the +50 items which had colourless clear glass. I certainly don't intend to argue that point with you, since personal preferences are subjective and personal, and as such they aren't necessarily based on facts or logic.
But, you should be aware that bulbs like the ones you say you prefer significantly reduce the actual, real, objective performance of your lamps. They emit less light than even standard ordinary colourless-glass bulbs, and less of what they do put out is
usable light. They create more glare than even high-output colourless-glass bulbs. They have a shorter lifespan than colourless-glass bulbs. And, they are sold at a high premium price compared to colourless-glass bulbs. For all those reasons, they are neither an effective nor a cost-effective choice. Now, here is proof:
1. They emit less light and have a shorter lifespan
This is a simple matter of physics. There is no such thing as a colour filter that does not subtract some portion of the light passing through it. That's what filtration is! Light that is absorbed by the filter is not available to illuminate the road and obstacles on or near it. Here's manufacturer data, from internal engineering databases, for output and lifespan at 13.2v for H1 bulbs. The numbers here are a composite of values applicable to the products of the big three European makers (Osram-Sylvania, Philips-Narva, Tungsram-GE). Each manufacturer's product in each category is slightly different but not significantly so. I picked H1-type bulbs @ 13.2v for this comparison, and while the absolute numbers differ with different bulb types (9006, H4, H7, H3, etc.), the relative comparison patterns hold good for whatever bulb type you consider. Lifespan is given as Tc, the hour figure at which 63.2 percent of the bulbs have failed.
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H1 (regular normal):
1550 lumens, 650 hours
•
H1 Long Life (often OE fitment in North America)
1460 lumens, 1200 hours
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H1 Plus+30 High Efficacy (Osram Super, Sylvania Xtravision, Narva Rangepower, Candlepower Bright Light, Tungsram High Output, Philips Premium, GE NightHawk):
1700 lumens, 350 hours
•
H1 Plus+50 Ultra High Efficacy (Philips VisionPlus,
Osram Silverstar, Narva Rangepower+50, Tungsram Megalicht, but
not Sylvania Silverstar):
1750 lumens, 350 hours
•
H1 blue-glass 'extra white' (Osram CoolBlue, Narva Rangepower Blue, Philips BlueVision, Tungsram Super Blue or EuroBlue,
Sylvania Silverstar, also PIAA Superwhite, Xtremewhite, Platinumwhite, etc—they've been rebranding and rebranding and rebranding these bulbs for the last decade or so):
1380 lumens, 250 hours
Now, looking over these results, which one would you rather:
(a) Buy and drive with?
(b) Sell?
The answer to (a) depends on how well you want to see versus how often to change the bulb. If you want the best possible seeing, you pick the Plus+50. If you don't care as long as it works and you don't want to hassle with it, you pick the long life.
The answer to (b) is determined by how rich your company's shareholders want you to be, and is obvious: You want to sell the bulb with the shortest lifespan, highest promotability and highest price. That'd be the blue-glass 'extra white' type, because that's how marketing works: it's easier to upsell and make claims based on something you can see when you pick up the product at the store and ogle it (e.g., different glass colour) than it is to do so based on something that you can't (think about it: "Buy these +50 bulbs, which when you hold them in the hand look identical to a plain old ordinary bulb"...not a very sexy marketing appeal, is it?)
More support for this assertion comes from the light-tunnel tests AutoExpress carried out several years ago, preserved
here (for H7 bulbs) and
here here and
here (for H4 bulbs). Pay attention to the "beam" ratings, which are the luxmeter readings at the point of peak intensity. Sure, the blue bulbs aren't always at the very bottom of the heap, but it's clear by comparing the beam ratings that the highest-performing bulbs all have colourless clear glass. It stands to reason, and here is why:
The light-stealing effect of the blue glass is compensated by higher-wattage filaments. Remember, though, the degree to which such compensation works is limited by the legal regulations on bulbs. For every bulb type, there's a maximum allowable power consumption as well as a minimum and maximum allowable light output. So, the filament wattage can be increased to produce extra light (which is then stolen by the blue glass), but it's practically impossible to meet or exceed the output of an colorless-glass bulb because either you run up against the legal max wattage, or you reduce the lifespan to grossly unaceptable, short values. So, virtually all of these blue bulbs produce less light than their untinted counterparts, because the allowable range of light output is typically 30% while the allowable max wattage is frequently as tight as 7%. You can see the whole list of approved bulb types and their allowable output and wattage specs
here (data from USC 49CFR564). Think about that for a moment: In the case of the "HB2" (H4) bulbs in your G-klasse, the allowable output is spec ±10%, which means a range of 20%. At 12.8v, the HB2 is permitted to emit between 728 and 1092 lumens. That's a pretty sizeable range, there—do you want to be driving around at night with the 730-lumen bulb, or with the 1090-lumen item, in your lamps? I know which ones I want. Note the wattage limitation for this bulb type is 72w on high beam, and 65w on low beam. That is a power rating at
12.8 volts, which is the US standard test voltage. The 12v ratings commonly used to refer to bulbs (e.g. "12v 55w" or in the case of H4, "12v 60/55w") are nominal ratings at 12.0 volts. Internationalized European ECE regulations contain these nominal 12v ratings as well as service ratings at 13.2v (for an H4: 1650/1000 lumens ± 15%, at 75/68w max). This can be confusing, but it's necessary to explain the different rating systems so that you can compare apples to apples.
Now, let's look at exactly what happens when we add blue/purple filtration to the bulb glass. Filament bulbs that have been filtered to produce "whiter" (actually bluer) light colour, AND which comply with DOT or ECE regulations, can be classified in two categories:
•The kind that produces about 12 to 20 percent less light than an unfiltered bulb and has a somewhat shorter lifespan
•The kind that produces almost the same amount of light as an unfiltered bulb and has an extremely short lifespan.
There are no "extra white" filtered bulbs that produce identical lumens to an unfiltered bulb
and have the same lifespan, and there are certainly
none that produce _more_ lumens than an unfiltered bulb. There's no free lunch.
Glowing filaments produce a whole lot of light in the red-orange-yellow-green wavelengths, and only very little light in the blue-violet wavelengths. To put rough illustrative numbers on the matter, suppose that the low beam filament of an H4 bulb operating at 13.2v produces 1000 lumens (that happens to be the ECE spec), of which 250 are red, 250 are orange, 250 are yellow, 175 are green, 50 are blue and 25 are violet.
Now, suppose you want to add a filter to the glass that makes the light look bluer so that your marketing department can claim "HID look", "whiter light", "closer to natural daylight", "higher colour temperature" and the like. How does it do that? Well, there's no such thing as a filter that adds light into the beam passing through it—filters can only suppress light, not add it. So if we can't add green-blue-violet light, then the only way to get the light to look colder is to suppress green-blue-violet's opposites, which are red-orange-yellow. If we want the light to look, let's say, 20% bluer, we suppress red-orange-yellow by 20%. Looking up above, we see that we've got a total of 750 lumens' worth of red, orange and yellow. So, cutting this by 20% leaves 600 lumens, plus essentially all of the bulb's original green-blue-violet output of 250 lumens, so we've now got a bulb that produces light that looks 20% bluer and produces 850 lumens.
That 850 lumens happens to be the minimum legal output for an H4 low beam at 13.2v. One lumen less, and it's illegal. Unless you're a completely stinky Chinese company that really doesn't give a rat's patoot about it, you can't produce a bulb that produces only the bare minimum of light, because the nature of mass production is such that 50% of production will be 849 lumens or less. So, you have to put in a high-luminance filament to try to counteract some of the filtering losses. BUT we still have to come in under the max-allowable-wattage spec in DOT or ECE regulations.
So, let's say we build our H4 with a super-duper filament that produces 1200 lumens. That's too much for an H4, but we're going to take away some of those lumens with our blue glass. This 1200-lumen filament produces, let's say, 300 lumens red, 300 lumens orange, 300 lumens yellow, 210 lumens green, 60 lumens blue and 30 lumens violet. Now we put that same blue glass over it, which suppresses red-orange-yellow by 20%. Now we've got 720 lumens' worth of red-orange-yellow after filtration, plus 300 lumens' worth of green-blue-violet. That gives us a 910-lumen bulb, which is enough above the 850-lumen legal "floor" that we can run the bulb and even if some filaments only produce 1150 lumens instead of 1200, we're still legally OK. Of course, we still only have 910 lumens instead of the nominal 1000 or max-allowable 1150, and our 1200-lumen filament is going to have a significantly shorter life than a 1000-lumen filament, but we've got our bluer ("whiter") light appearance in a legal bulb. Thing is, this bluer ("whiter") light
does not do anything to help us see better. All it does is alter the operating appearance of the lamp. Some people consider the resultant appearance more attractive than that of a lamp operating with a bulb using untinted glass, but the reality is that
you are trading away real, actual seeing performance for a marketeer's notion of what looks cool.
2. They produce more glare
For any given intensity, the higher the relative blue content of the lamp's spectral power distribution, the greater the discomfort glare,
WITHOUT any significant corresponding increase in seeing performance. This is the well-documented finding of two of North America's foremost researchers in human factors related to seeing and conspicuity in traffic, messrs. Sullivan and Flannagan of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (the study is Sullivan, J M, and Flannagan, M J:
Visual Effects of Blue-Tinted Tungsten-Halogen Headlamp Bulbs. Michigan University, Ann Arbor, Transportation Research Institute, UMTRI #94291, April 2001). This is the heart of the
illusion that these bulbs are brighter/better: you install them, stand in front of your vehicle, turn them on and get a visual impression of brighter lamps. "Wow, these are definitely brighter!" Well...no. They appear brighter to anyone looking at the headlamp, i.e., those in front of you in traffic, because of the suppression of yellow-orange-red light giving rise to relatively higher blue-violet content in the SPD. But that same suppression of yellow-orange-red definitely means poorer seeing, per the explanation above. This is why the many marketers of blue bulbs spend so much effort distracting you with jabber about the
appearance of the headlamps and don't mention lumens or seeing performance at all. (It should be mentioned, there is
one study that claimed to find an amazing, giant 50% improvement in drivers' ability to see when using a particular manufacturer's blue-tinted 'extra white' bulbs. That manufacturer funded the study and provided both the blue-tinted and standard-comparison bulbs for the project. You may draw your own conclusions.) The human visual system is very easily "fooled"; it is extremely easy to create conditions under which we feel we can see significantly better or worse than we actually can. When you are driving around by the light of bulbs you think let you see better, but which in fact reduce your objective seeing performance, you are markedly less safe.
You mention that you installed the PIAA blue-glass bulbs in your fog lamps, too. That was a counterproductive thing to do, perhaps even more so than when you put them in your headlamps. Not only do all the factors discussed above apply equally to fog lamps as to headlamps, but there is an additional factor at work when we consider bad-weather seeing, in which reduced-yellow/increased-blue is exactly the wrong way to go for optimum seeing in rain, fog and snow. It used to be popular to claim that yellow fog lamps are better because the yellow light "scatters less" in fog, snow and rain. That's wrong, there is no Rayleigh Scattering of vehicle lamp light in roadway fog. Rayleigh Scattering (the effect that makes the sky blue) occurs only when the water droplets are smaller than the light wavelengths, and such is not the case (not by several orders of magnitude) in roadway fog. The advantage of yellow light in rain/fog/snow has to do with the human visual system, which has a very tough time processing blue light. You may easily demonstrate this to yourself by looking at a dark blue storefront sign, a blue airport runway light, a string of blue Christmas lights, etc. from a distance of greater than about 15 feet: you will find the edges of such a blue light considerably blurrier and less distinct than the edges of a light source of any other colour. Blue wavelengths tend to focus ahead of the retina, rather than on it; it is a testament to the adaptibility of the human visual system that we're able to see blue edges as well as we can! This phenomenon can be taken to whatever yellow-extent you wish (the Germans wish for the extent to end at neutral white; the French historically wanted a much greater extent—they mandated selective-yellow light from all vehicle headlamps for sixty years), but the fact is that a SPD with suppressed yellow and relatively increased blue is opposite to what is needed for optimum seeing in poor weather. Back to the research; this one you can
download for free.
Finally, some thoughts about the lighting equipment on your specific G-klasse: You made an error. Those Bosch lamps you specifically mention as having "no shield over the bulb" are not designed or intended for automotive (car/truck) usage. They're the 0 301 600 114
motorcycle headlamp. The optics are different, to produce a wider but significantly shorter-reaching beam than the car/truck 7" round lamp (which is Bosch 0 301 600 107). There are some 7" round headlamps that control upward stray light very effectively without bulb shields, but the decisions Bosch made with regard to reflector focal length and lens geometry mean that the lack of a bulb shield, in this particular lamp design, creates extremely high levels of upward stray light coming off the bulb's low-beam filament and scattering via the lens because it has not been directed by the reflector. Not really an issue in dry weather, but in rain, fog or snow, the upward wash light significantly degrades your ability to see forward. You can see this upward light easily by parking underneath a ceiling (garage, tunnel, etc.), turning on the low beams and looking upward! The bulb shield is omitted from the motorcycle version of the lamp for several reasons: The motorcycle headlamp performance requirements are considerably laxer in both the US and the international ECE regulations with regards to seeing distance and upward stray light. And, Bosch's bulb shield design is not at all vibrationproof; it is held to the reflector by the spring tension of its two support legs, and while this is generally adequate even for fairly rough car/truck service, the higher amplitudes of the vibration found in motorcycle service very quickly cause such bulb shields to detach from the reflector. They then rattle around within the headlamp, scratching up the reflective material and spoiling the headlamp.
In addition, the motorcycle headlamps you installed have a very much cheaper and less effective bulb holder and seal boot design. The car/truck headlamp has a separate heat-compensating bulb seat, while the bulb seat in the motorcycle headlamp is simply carved out of the steel reflector. Beam focus is much better and more consistent with the heat-compensating seat, but again, the motorcycle beam regulations are considerably less exacting than the car/truck requirements. And the car/truck seal boot has a labyrinthine vent/drain, while the motorcycle boot is simply a plain rubber cup. Yeah, you're going to get condensation that's tough to control with those lamps! You are correct that the original Hella optics are a particularly weak design, but the lamps you chose to replace them were not a wise or well-advised selection.
You're also correct that higher-wattage bulbs must be approached with extreme caution, but some of your information there is confused as well. There is no reason why overwattage bulbs would be problem free simply because your vehicle is "Euro spec". When increasing bulb wattage, the headlamp circuit must be upgraded to handle the extra current draw. Failure to do so will only cause catastrophic damage (fire) in extreme cases (e.g. 130w bulbs on a circuit designed for 45w bulbs, or 100w bulbs in thermoplastic headlamp reflectors), but even without a catastrophe, voltage drop increases with increasing current, and small voltage drops make large reductions in light output. Remember, light output is exponential to the power 3.4 with varying voltage! A 1v drop across the headlamp circuit sounds trivial until you realise that going from 13.2v to 12.2v drops the output of an H4 low beam from 1000 lumens to 765 lumens. So, that's the electrical reality. The heat reality is what has kept owners of newer G-klassen with the ZKW clear-lens headlamps from increasing bulb power. However, there have been some new bulbs introduced by Osram of Germany that offer some slick solutions to both problems, one of which is their 70/65w high efficacy bulb. This bulb produces 2000/1350 lumens at 13.2v with maximum
actual wattage of 75/68, which is the ECE upper limit and therefore within what stock headlamp circuits are designed to handle. Of course, the lumens are higher than spec, so these bulbs are not DOT-legal, but guess what? Neither are your H4 headlamp units to begin with! The 70/65w Osram H4 bulb gives considerably better headlamp performance than any of the 60/55w +50 bulbs, and vastly better
actual performance than any blue-glass 'extra-white' bulb...regardless of name brand, selling price, or package attractiveness."
H11 Headlights
virus just wrote out a essay but good info none the less..i changed the bulbs on my 04 cam to the "blueish" bulbs..it is a bit dimmer but meh i just spend 30 bucks on them im not gonna put my stocks back and let them collect dust
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