Britrover

I am looking for opinions between the Philips Ultinon 6k xenon bulb vs. the stock 4300 Kelvin xenon bulb. I had read rave reviews on the Ultinon but wanted to get a better idea from members who are using the 6k bulb and how many lumens of light will I lose going with the 6k vs. the 4300 Kelvin OEM bulb. Bulb application will be in a RS6 projector retrofitted by our very own master craftsman Zam2000.

If you have any pictures of your car with the 6k bulb kindly post them as it will help me tremendously in better gauging the color temperature as well.

Cheers

Semikolon

The ultinons are not road legal i europe and north america. I think the rated output is about 2800lm, the standard bulbs have 3100lm I think.

There is a new bulb from Philips called Ultrablue. This is similar to the ultinon, but it's road legal. It's expensive though... talking $140++ each bulb.

another thing to consider is the light QUALITY. That is much more than how much light it produces. The quality of the light gets lower the higher color temperature it has. I had a guy in my car whose reaction was immediate when I turned on the lights, it looked so much better to drive with. I have the standard + 4300k, he has some 6000k bulbs.

Also the light quality of a halogen filament bulb is much better than the light quality of a xenon burner.

Figuero

Please explain "light quality". Are you talking about color temp, beam pattern, something else?

Semikolon

The higher temperature the more dead/gray and dull everything looks. The beam pattern will of course be the same..

Figuero

Got it - that's one of the reason for the warm lighting at the meet counter.
And "cool white" is not exactly flattering

Figuero

errrr.....Meat counter

Semikolon

and fruits and vegetables looks much more fresh with the 2700/3000K light recommended than 4000K light.

I'm an electrician and I have tried this myself. I put the wrong fluorescent tubes in a lamp once when we installed a grocery store and it looked terrible!


But the CRI/Color rendering index is as important as the color temperature to get good looking colors. for shops the recommended cri is as close to 1 (100%) as possible, while the yellow sodium lamps you find in the streets and tunnels have a cri well under 0,5. If you have noticed that all colors becomes either black, gray or yellow, than the cri is the reason or that.

For automobile xenon burners the cri is about 0,78, which means you lose very much quality of the light, similar colors that would look much different in sunlight may look the same in the light from a xenon headlight. and the higher kelvin rating you have the more blue/gray everything will look, as you won't get as much of that yellow tone to fill the colors.