http://www.danielsternlighting.com/t...e/bad/bad.html
Headlight glare is bad enough here in the US, and color similarity is only that. I say for $55 you still wasted your money because there is no real benefit of putting in those kind of bulbs except for the (poser-ish) looks.
To quote:
What's All The Fuss?
Various companies and individuals are selling halogen headlamp bulbs with blue or purplish-blue glass. There are lots of spurious claims made for these bulbs. They're falsely advertised as "Xenon bulbs" or "HID bulbs", the blue glass is claimed to "force the bulb to perform at a higher level", and there are seemingly endless amounts of pseudoscience aimed at enticing buyers who want better performance from their headlamps. In fact, these bulbs
reduce headlamp performance while increasing dangerous glare. How and why are blue bulbs dangerous?
Many of them degrade roadway safety,” both yours and other drivers'. Some of them can be physically hazardous. Here are the nuts and bolts of why blue bulbs are a bad idea:
White light is made up of every color of light mixed together. But the colors are not all present in equal amounts. The output spectrum of filament bulbs, including halogen headlamp bulbs, includes a great deal of red, orange, yellow and green light, but very little blue or violet light. Blue bulbs have colored glass (or a filter coating applied to clear glass) that allows only the blue light through the filter — this is why the bulbs appear blue. Because very little blue light is produced by a halogen bulb in the first place, it is only this very small amount — a tiny fraction of the total amount of light produced by a halogen bulb filament — that ever reaches the road.
Blue and violet are the shortest wavelength/highest frequency colors of visible light, and, as such, they scatter the most readily. This is why the sky is blue rather than any other color from the sun's white output spectrum. Blue light doesn't just scatter most readily in the sky, but also in the eye. To observe this effect, try this informal experiment: Next time you see a dark blue storefront sign or a row of blue airport runway landing lights after dark, notice how blurry the edges of the sign or landing light appears compared to adjacent lights or signs of different colors. Decades ago, hot rodders would install "blue dots" in their cars' taillamps. These small bits of blue glass cause the taillamps to appear not red with a blue dot in the center, but rather pinkish-purple, because the observer's eye easily focuses on the red but has trouble with the blue, which remains out of focus and appears to tint the entire area of the red light.
Compared to uncolored bulbs, Blue headlight bulbs are able to produce more glare with less light because of the difference between the "signal image", which is what an observer sees when looking at an illuminated headlamp, and the "beam pattern", which is the light viewed from behind the headlamp facing forward, as by the driver of a vehicle. In order for headlamp light to be used by the driver, the light must travel forward from the headlamp to an object, bounce off the object and return to the driver's eyes. As light travels through the atmosphere, it spreads and diffuses according to the Inverse Square Law: The intensity drops as 1
/(distance)2. That is, a given headlamp will illuminate an object 2 feet away with 1/4 of the intensity found at the front face of the headlamp, an object 3 feet away with 1/9 of the source intensity, an object 10 feet away with 1/100 of the source intensity, and so on — and then this loss is redoubled because the light must travel back to the observer's eyes. Remember that the blue filtration prevents the bulk of the light being produced from reaching the road, so the light "stealing" effect of the Inverse Square law becomes greatly magnified:
Less light by which to see. On the other hand, light travels directly from the headlamp to the eyes of the oncoming observer, so the "back to the driver's eyes" redoubling of the Inverse Square law does not take place:
More glare. Therefore, for any given distance between the headlamps and the observer, there'll be considerably more light to cause glare than there'll be to allow the driver to see
More glare.
...Radd Guy...
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