The Hella Super 7" lamp has been around awhile; I drove with a set of them for awhile in the late 1990s. They're one of the newest and lowest volume of all the Hella 7" lamps, which bodes well if for no other reason than the tooling would have less wear on it. I have photometric data on it somewhere; a bunch of that stuff is all packed up from a recent move (unpack and organize? Please just shoot me) so it's effectively not available right now. From memory, the high vs low beam focus issue isn't as pronounced as with the regular Hella 7" H4 headlamp. I don't recall my socks being knocked off by a giant improvement in performance of the Super vs. the regular, either while driving at night or while scrutinizing the photometric data. As 7" H4 headlamps go, it's one of the better ones in production. It doesn't touch the Cibie Z-beam or the Marchal units, but those were discontinued years ago.
If it's going to be an H4 headlamp of one kind or another, I might tend to lean toward the
Vision Plus instead of the Super -- contrary to persistent internet "wisdom", it is
not the case that an ECE (European, "E-code") headlamp is automatically superior to an SAE (US, "DOT") headlamp. Longer seeing distance with the Vision Plus, wider high beam coverage, no high beam/low beam focus issue. The early versions of this lamp, first released in the early 1990s, sometimes had issues with taking on water, but a change was made to the seal boot configuration and that's no longer an issue. This, too, is a newer and lower-volume lamp than the standard Hella 7" unit which dates to the mid-1970s.
Rallylights is a reliable, good vendor, but there's actually a lot of text on their website that appears to be just completely made up advertising verbiage pulled out of thin air. No, those lamps do not have a "silverized polished aluminum" reflector, whatever that word soup is supposed to mean. They have the same reflector as every other Hella headlamp: vacuum-deposited or sputter-deposited aluminum with a silica top coat. Silver isn't involved (but if it was, it would outperform the aluminum by a small margin. Silver is more reflective than aluminum, but requires an absolutely perfect top coat to avoid tarnish/oxidation, and is more expensive, so aluminum is used).
Since we're on their page for the Hella Super lights, let's keep reading the ad copy:
The problem with sealed beams is that the lens, reflector and fillaments are all part of a bonded assembly.
That's not a problem, that's an advantage! It means the lamp is impervious to water and dirt (and numbskulls with "HID kits" and "LED bulbs").
When the filament burns out, the entire lamp is discarded.
Yes...and when sealed beams were prevalent, development was actively ongoing on them and every driver got the latest updates whenever they put in new headlamps. That meant the guy with the '55 Oldsmobile (or whatever) got better headlamps in his same car in '60, in '66, in '73, in '79, etc. That was a big advantage of the sealed beam standardization versus model-specific headlamps for which (in most cases) no options exist, so your choices are usually a genuine replacement just like the ones that came on the car, or a pathetic aftermarket knockoff of same. Of course once there stopped being money in the sealed beam business the advantage broke down because nobody wants to pour money into up-to-date tooling (or even tooling in good shape) to replace old worn-out tooling. But cars that came with sealed beams still take standard-size headlamps, and there are many good options now that didn't exist back when the Z-beam and the Marchal were available. Various good LED headlamps, the Hella Bi-Xenon headlamp, etc.
Consequently, the sealed beam has become a commodity.
I'm not sure how this is supposed to be a disadvantage. And what, like the H4 bulb (first introduced in 1969 in the UK, and Europe-wide by 1972) isn't a commodity? BS! It's the world's most common headlight bulb. Definitely a commodity.
As long as it meets the DOT standard, the only thing that matters is low cost.
That can be said, accurately, of just about any part of any car. Cost control is a fundamental, central pillar of almost the entire vehicle and vehicle-parts industry.
The DOT standard allows for a very loose pattern
A headlamp beam pattern cannot be "loose" any more than it can be "crisp" or "delicious". What's with the random adjective?
with a wide transition from dark to light.
This seems to be an appeal to the internet "wisdom" that a sharp cutoff means a good beam and a soft cutoff means a bad beam. That just plain is not the case. There is a sweet spot where you have a cutoff sufficiently sharp to easily and reliably aim the headlamp, but not too sharp or else you start getting disadvantages that accrue directly to the nighttime driver.
Many sealed beams still conform to the antiquated pre 2000 DOT standard that required 20% of the light go up to illuminate overhead signs.
None of this is right. The US headlamp standard was substantially upgraded in 1997, not 2000, and it has never "required 20% of the light to go up to illuminate overhead signs" or anything like that. The US headlamp standard does contain minimal requirements for uplight for overhead signs. So does the European headlamp standard! And the amounts required are about the same, though US lamps tend to provide more uplight than European lamps.
All of this results in lamps that dazzle oncoming traffic and at the same time supply poor illumination of the road.
OK, the US headlamp standard explicitly allows more glare light from low beams than the European standard does, but a much bigger reason why US headlamps are more glaring is that headlamps are aimed
much lower in Europe than they are in the US. Aim settings of 1.5° to 2° down are common in Europe, where the nominal aim setting for a similar US headlamp (a "VOL" type of low beam) is 0.7° down. That alone makes the biggest difference in seeing distance and glare between a US headlamp and a European headlamp. If you take any one given headlamp at a typical mounting height and aim it at 1.4° down, your maximum possible beam reach on the left is only 141 feet, which is not enough. Aim it at 0.7° down instead, and your maximum possible beam reach on the left doubles to 282 feet. This is also a key reason why a sharp cutoff is misunderstood to automatically minimize glare: with the lamps aimed down to European values, the bright part of the beam seldom rises up to the level of other drivers' eyes. With the lamps aimed to US values, the bright part of the beam can "zap" other drivers if the car goes over a rise in the road, a speed bump, etc. But this is true whether or not there's a sharp cutoff; the difference is in the contrast between the normal and "zap" conditions.
Back to the Rallylights text:
The sharp low beam cutoff of Hella ECE lamps makes the areas that are supposed to be dark, darker
What are we defining as an area that is supposed to be dark? Other drivers' eyes, yes, obviously, but...road signs? Pedestrians?
and the lighted areas to be brighter
No, a sharp cutoff does not make lighted areas brighter.
We say that our lamps are four times brighter on low beam and twice as bright on high beam
Yes, they do say that...without any grounds for saying it. It's just not true. The maximum low beam intensity for a quality 7" round H4 headlamp is about 12,000 to 19,000 candela. The maximum low beam intensity for a quality 7" round sealed beam is about 20,000 to 30,000 candela. So where's all this "four times brighter" light from the H4? It doesn't exist, is where it is. A comparison of this nature is pointless. The two kinds of headlamp put out beams containing about the same amount of light, distributed differently. There are plus-points and minus-points to both of them. Neither of them are categorically better or more useful or safer than the other.
Refer to the Isolux drawings at left for a comparison of the light patterns.
Those "isolux drawings" they show are completely and totally fictional. Like, "Mommy, tell me a fairytale!" fictional. The illumination distances are just plain ridiculous! 1250 feet from a sealed beam, 1700 feet from an H4? Absolutely no way, no matter what lux level we might be talking about. A properly-aimed quality 7" round sealed beam will give a 1-lux max seeing distance of roughly 200 feet. A properly-aimed (to US specs) quality 7" round H4 lamp will give a 1-lux max seeing distance of roughly 170 feet. At 1250 or 1700 feet, neither lamp is producing any light at all usable by the driver.
If your car has sealed beams, this is the most effective, simplest and least expensive improvement in forward lighting you can make.
That is debatable. H4 is not some magical amazing technology, it's state of the art 1970!
Optical Quartz Lens
No, it's borosilicate glass, a good grade of the same stuff your Pyrex baking dishes are made out of. Optical quartz is extremely expensive and has never been used for headlamp lenses. Halogen bulbs used to all be made of it, before glass technology caught up and offered much easier manufacturing and much lower cost.
Silverized Polished Aluminum Reflector
Already addressed this weirdness above.
Replaceable H4 Bulb
This part they got right
Four times as much light on Low Beam, Twice as much on High Beam.
Still not true no matter how many times they say it.
In response to requests from users in Scandinavia, Hella developed an updated "SUPER" version with specific changes to enhance the performance needed in the land of 24 hour nights
Cool story, bro. Is it true? Who knows?
