Please Have Mercy

[94 formula]

I couldn't agree more. I'll be driving home from my girlfriends house late at night, my eyes will be adjusted to the dark and it's like "Hey, this is kinda relaxiAHHH MY RETINA!!!". The worst part is that they like.....reflect perfectly off all of your mirrors and directly into your eyes. It really only bothers me when the car is behind me. They still hurt when the car is going the other way but not as bad. I heard they were trying to outlaw those (at least by where i live)

Finally someone agrees with me lol. I have no problem with a brighter safer light its just that they're going a little to far. I wonder if there is a regulation on how bright they are allowed to get?

[96z28]

Yes, there is. I'm not sure what how bright but i know some ppl have illegal ones. Some ppl just drive around with thier low beams on and still blind ppl. I think that is going too far. If i got some they would be legal because i dotn want to get in trouble. Where I live the cops suck so you get pulled over for illegal window tint and crap like that. You cannot have neons (only affects the ricers) and you have to have a front plate (which makes your car look ugly) One good thing though, we dont have emmisions so u can pretty much do whatever you want under the hood.

Finally someone agrees with me lol. I have no problem with a brighter safer light its just that they're going a little to far. I wonder if there is a regulation on how bright they are allowed to get?

[raroZ28]

You cannot have neons (only affects the ricers)

lol 240sx turbo - ricer this, awesome headlights - ricer that, neons - ricer, etc... Neon's are not so ricerish IMO. My friend had a set of red street glo's on his red 01 SS and they looked killer. stud factor goes up 2 points with those. Will put a set of Blue ones on my ride. I am not a ricer by any means. I'm the most go fast guy you'll meet, but I like neons for some reason. Always have.

[96z28]

I have seen them of some pretty fast cars/trucks. I am just making fun of the ones on slow cars that want to go down the road with thier fartcans blaring and reving up at corvettes and other cars that are actually fast.

lol 240sx turbo - ricer this, awesome headlights - ricer that, neons - ricer, etc... Neon's are not so ricerish IMO. My friend had a set of red street glo's on his red 01 SS and they looked killer. stud factor goes up 2 points with those. Will put a set of Blue ones on my ride. I am not a ricer by any means. I'm the most go fast guy you'll meet, but I like neons for some reason. Always have.

[Trans Am]

I would put xenons on my t/a
in fact im looking for some at junkyards ,maybe I can fit them on but I dont want to change the appearance of the car. Maybe if I put them where the fog lights are , it wont blind other drivers
Anyone has pictures of f-bodies with xenons?

[Joe K. 99 Zeee!!]

Here are some good links from a thread I started a couple weeks ago....

http://web.camaross.com/forums/showt...dlight+upgrade

http://lightguide.cz28.com/

Given the choice, I'd rather have Xenon lights, but I'm not going to spend the 400-500 for the upgrade. Check out the links above for cheaper options if you don't get Xenon. If you choose to modify the stock housings with a new bulb, I'd go with the 9006 Sylvania Silverstar 55W. I went with some Xtra Vision ones that I had around the apartment and noticed an improvement. Maybe not as dramatic an improvement as your Dad is looking for though.

Actually...I'd spend $500 on upgrading my front brakes. With the 93-97 brakes I'd be more afraid that I couldn't stop in time even if I saw the deer.

[Injuneer]

There is some excellent "tech" info about lighting on this site:

Daniel Stern Lighting

That gets you to the "Home" page... then click on the "Tech" section... dispells myths about a lot of headlight "upgrades" that turn out to be downgrades. I thought it was interesting the the "Silverstar" lights that Sylvania sells in the US are in no way related to the high performance Silverstars they sell outside the US. In fact, they appear to have a very short life span. Read some of the Q&A's beofre you spend money.

[nathanaf8388]

From what i hear those silverstars put a silver glow and those cool blue are pretty nice they are both good ways to getting better lights without a full conversion from my understanding
Here in Indian ya gotta be 15 to get your learners and 16 and a month to get drivers than your sposed to be 16 and 90 days to be able to drive with passengers

[AmericanZ28]

TBYRNE use to sell HID kits for the LT1 Camaros and included everything you needed including the housings. I had a link saved to a specific page on their website which had pictures and pricing, but for some reason its not opening up. With regards to the glare that you see coming from cars equiped with HID lighting, it is usually the result of a projector style housing. A traditional reflector style headlamp with HID bulbs will not cause the kind of glare that projectors do. Projectors however have superior light pattern and beam cut off. You could buy a good HID kit here . All you'll need then is a good housing to put them in. Someone here mentined how the GE housings have a good light pattern .

[Injuneer]

Read the site I referenced.... "blue" is about the worst lighting you can put on your car. Lighting is reduced by up to 67%, and glare to other drivers is increased by 33%. Specifically, the "Sylvania CoolBlue" does not offer any advantage over a standard bulb.

The quote below describes the dangerous and illegal "blue" lights.... and should offer enough evidence to allow you to understand why these blue lights endanger you and the drivers in oncoming vehicles.

There is also a section on "legal" blue lights, which do not offer any advantage, and you can also find that on the page that I referenced.

Dangerous, illegal, blue headlight bulbs

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.

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How can there be more glare if there's less light?

Informal tests by the US Department of Transportation's Office of Crash Avoidance Standards found that a standard-wattage 9004-type blue headlamp bulb reduced the road lighting ability of a standard headlamp by 67%, and increased glare for oncoming and preceeding trafic by 33%. This apparent contradiction arises because of the way the human eye handles light of different colors. The short-wavelength colors (blue, indigo and violet) are very difficult for our eyes to process and focus on.

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.

Note that some types of "blue" headlamp bulbs are actually legal and not necessarily unsafe; you can read about them here

Does the scattering tendency of blue light affect headlamp performance and road safety in other ways?

Yes, in two ways:

Because blue light scatters very readily in the human eye, casting a beam that's blue-tinted by any amount in a rainy, foggy or snowy environment causes increased perceived backglare for the driver of a car equipped with blue headlamp bulbs.

Also, blue light per se creates increased glare for oncoming traffic. That's because blue light does not trigger a strong pupil-closing response in human eyes. It is yellow light that stimulates the human eye most strongly to constrict the pupil. Due to the comparatively weak pupil response to blue light, the human eye is very glare-sensitive to a blue signal image. With the yellow light filtered out by the blue bulb and prevented from reaching the observer's eyes, the pupils remain wider open than they should, and the eyes are hit with a blast of difficult-to-process blue light.


Isn't the same amount of blue light reaching the observer's eyes whether or not the bulb is blue?

Although the same amount of blue is emitted by a halogen bulb whether it's got a blue-filter coating or not, in the "no filter" case, the remainder of the output spectrum—consisting largely of yellow light—triggers a pupil-closing response in the eyes of oncoming traffic, helping to reduce the short and long term effects of headlamp glare. This glare-protection response is severely compromised when the oncoming signal image is blue.

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What about real Xenon headlamps that are blue from the factory?


Are these blue bulbs illegal?

US, Canadian, European and Japanese regulations all call for "white" light. There is no one specific light color that is defined as "white" light; rather, there is a large range of output spectra that are considered "white", and the "white" light is permitted to exhibit visible tints of blue, yellow, green, orange or red. Various regulatory bodies are considering narrowing the "white" standard so that it is less permissive of blue tinting. Such has been the spread of blue headlamp bulbs that many police agencies have purchased in-field beam color testers—they use these on headlamps that look too blue to be legally considered "white".

What about blue-tinted headlight bulbs that I found at a local auto parts store, or on the internet? They're sold as being "DOT Approved". Are these legal?

Probably not. There's no such thing as "DOT approved". DOT does not "approve" products as the European regulatory body does. Rather, the manufacturer of an item of motor vehicle equipment is legally obligated to self-certify that his product complies with all applicable regulations. For some items of equipment, such as headlamp bulbs, the certification takes the form of a "DOT" marking on the bulb base. However, there is no legal obligation for the manufacturer to submit his product for government testing before applying the marking, and many companies go ahead and apply the marking even to bulbs that do not comply with the law. The relevant regulations (US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108, Canadian Motor Vehicle Safety Standards 108 and 108.1, and ECE Regulations 8, 20, 37, 98, 99, 112 and 113 all call for "white" light, defined as discussed above, so the statement of DOT compliance itself is false for a bulb that emits a light color obviously different from "white".

Why is there even a market for bulbs like this, if they're so illegal and unsafe?

Many motorists have been confused by marketing claims for the blue bulbs, which falsely and incorrectly equate the blue bulbs' performance with the very expensive arc-discharge ("Xenon") headlamps found on top-line luxury cars. They have been led to believe that by replacing their car's headlamp bulbs with the blue-coated bulbs, their headlamps' performance will be increased. In fact, quite the opposite is true; their headlamps' performance is decreased by the use of blue bulbs.

There is psychology at work in the marketplace, as well. Many of these blue bulbs are sold at very high prices in extremely attractive packaging. It is well known to marketers that the motorist who pays $35 or $45 or even $85 for a set of "special high performance" bulbs will probably perceive a performance improvement even if there is actually .

Some motorists believe that the blue light makes their car look "cool". This would fall into the same category as the dark plastic headlamp and taillamp covers that are snapped-up by certain drivers for their appearance "enhancement" value, despite the fact that these covers, like the blue bulbs, are illegal and dangerous.

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Daniel Stern Lighting (Daniel J. Stern, Proprietor)

Copyright Â(c)2004 Daniel J. Stern. Latest revisions 1/1/04. No part of this text may be reproduced in any form without express permission of author. Permission to quote is granted for the purposes of communication with the author.