Quote:
Originally Posted by jhubbz
RalphP, are you telling me my 10,000k hids don't produce visible light? Last time I drove down the road, I'm almost positive I saw light coming from my headlights. Also, my brights are 12,000k and it lights up everything around me like it was daytime. Now I will admit 5000k or 4600k would definitely be brighter, but don't go around saying other areas of the light spectrum won't produce light. If you have not used or seen their effects in person, don't go talking down on it.
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No, I'm not saying they don't produce some visible light.
I'm saying the light isn't as efficient as better temps would be.
I suggest you re-read what I typed.
Light very far off from sunlight isn't used as efficiently by the human eye, so if you're wanting to SEE down the road, you want something very close to 5300K (the color of the Sun). Anything too far from that and you're losing some of the benefit of the brighter light.
And then you can get hit with the SECOND whammy - the portion of the eye that is used to control the iris? Is sensitive OUTSIDE of the range that the rods and cones respond to. So a bright 10,000K source can cause the iris to contract (it goes "Oh, bright stuff!" and stops down to protect the retina), while the portion of the eye you SEE with goes "Bright light? What bright light? I don't see much there ..." A waste of money.
Let's also add that such lights, shining into OTHER people's eyes, will tend to blind THEM. So a safe driver won't go for a street car with 10,000K HIDs.
Let me repeat something else here - NONE of this applies to show cars! If your car is a trailer queen, or a show horse, don't pay ANY attention to this!
If, however, you drive it, you DO need to pay attention to the actual Kelvin rating to get the benefit of what you're paying for.
A good example of this is that halogen bulbs put out a LOT of "light" in the near and far infrared range, where our eyes don't see it. I'm currently running HIRs for my low beams, HIDs for my high beams, and a 4-light mod. The HIRs use a special reflective coating inside that takes a major chunk of the infrared output, redirects it back to the filament, and causes a much brighter light that's still in the 4300K range, albeit with a bit less "red" to it (because that red is now being reradiated as a whiter color ... Funny what we can do with modern chemistry!
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RwP