Upgrade GXL headlight bulbs

[RanJ Avid PP Poster! Find all posts View Profile Close RanJ]

Nope. Cant stand them. In fact when I know Im going on a long haul night drive where I can spend over an hour without switching off my high beams, I'll often swap back to my halogen light bar and remove the LED bar for that reason. My eyes get tired.

[Symo Advanced Member Find all posts View Profile Close Symo]

I wonder about the recent interest in bluish light for driving. It is well documented that blue is one of the worst colours (frequencies) for the human eye to focus especially at night when the pupils are at maximum dilation. Humans have evolved with eyes most sensitive to yellow/green - which is why blue light is sometimes linked to eyestrain and fatigue if used for long periods. Has anyone found they enjoy using lights which produce light near the blue end of the spectrum?

Blue light is a shorter wave length and reflects more easily (that is why the sky is blue and not yellow). using them on your headlights makes night driving inteh rain near impossible, all you can see are rain drops in front of you and you can resolve the white lines from the sheen on the wet surface, bloody dangerous.

Halogen are superior even to LED and Bi-Xenon in this regard too. Unfortunately the raw material used in Halgen is near exhaustion as far as economical extraction is concerned, so the future is LED and Laser which all move up the wavelength to whiter light.

And halgen with a blue filter is just darkening the light as it has to pass through another layer of translucent material.

But it looks good on the box on the shelf!

[Symo Advanced Member Find all posts View Profile Close Symo]

Well I am on to my third set of bulbs in three years, 2 x Phillips blew at 13 months, our of warranty.

1x OSRAMs blew after 6 months. The original factory globes lasted three years. I waited a week to get them ordered on line via recommendations on here.

Maybe I should get Toyota to just do them in 1500kms at the 110k service... what ever they ship the truck with from Japan seem to outlast anything on the shelves, maybe Philips/Narva/OSRAM should look into Toyotas cutting edge filament technology for improvement lol.

[Leethal Advanced Member Find all posts View Profile Close Leethal]

Any bulb that has increased output for the same wattage will have a shorter life span, from memory I think Philips even list the expected life of their bulbs on their website.
So higher output = shorter life, standard output = longer life, therefore if you do a lot of night driving then standard bulbs are probably the go for reliability.
On another point I have been told the rationale behind the relatively poor performance of high beams on most modern cars is that where the cars are designed there is minimal opportunity for driving with high beam on due to traffic etc. so not a lot of effort is put into high beam performance.

Lee

[Symo Advanced Member Find all posts View Profile Close Symo]

Any bulb that has increased output for the same wattage will have a shorter life span, from memory I think Philips even list the expected life of their bulbs on their website.
So higher output = shorter life, standard output = longer life, therefore if you do a lot of night driving then standard bulbs are probably the go for reliability.
On another point I have been told the rationale behind the relatively poor performance of high beams on most modern cars is that where the cars are designed there is minimal opportunity for driving with high beam on due to traffic etc. so not a lot of effort is put into high beam performance.

Lee

Youtube will yield lots of results showing no difference between bulbs, there is more money invested in packaging than 100 year old filament bulb technology...

[Leethal Advanced Member Find all posts View Profile Close Leethal]

Youtube will yield lots of results showing no difference between bulbs, there is more money invested in packaging than 100 year old filament bulb technology...

No doubt however unless all the exposure data for the videos is shown to be identical in testing not really definitive proof.
Playing devil's advocate - If there is no difference in performance then why do the same brand of bulbs have different life spans? I find it hard to believe that manufacturers like Philips, Narva etc. would make completely false claims about their product if it is so easily proven false.
Do I think the hi output bulbs make a major difference, no I don't because there are too many other variables involved. In a lab with perfectly clean lenses & reflectors they may produce the claimed output but have weathered lenses, dusty reflectors etc. then any real world improvement will be minimal at best. Increasing actual light output through a dirty lens will increase scatter and affect other road users hence why headlight washers are an ADR requirement for HID and LED headlights to reduce light scatter as much as possible.
My old 90 had a nice coating of Simpson desert dust inside the headlights on the reflectors, most improvement was gained by cleaning then polishing the lenses. Vision was still average but it was a nice and clean average

Lee