that black cap they put on keeps other drivers from seeing direct into the filiment of the bulb, removing it makes the bulb about 20% brighter
In an integrating sphere, you will see about 9% more luminous flux if you remove the obscuration cap. However, this is useless light. It is coming through an area of unpredictably distorted glass, so it could not be used even if there were a way for it to be collected and focused by the headlamp's optics. If the headlamp has no bulb shield, this light just creates glare and backscatter. if the headlamp has a bulb shield, this light is blocked. There is no good reason to scrape off the obscuration cap. It does not make the headlamps better in any way. At best it does nothing, and at worst it just increases glare and backscatter.
a silverstars main feature was using "silver" for the cover cap, as opposed to black. the silver would reflect the light somewhere usable, and also reheat the filment itself a bit.
Neither of those statements is true. The silver obscuration cap does not reflect the light in any usable fashion, and it does not reheat the filament.
ts funny how the same companies are selling slight tint blue lights, and slight tint yellow, and saying that they are BOTH better
Well, let's talk about color filtration. The visible spectrum consists of all the colors of the rainbow: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo + violet. Glowing filaments produce a whole lot of light in the red-orange-yellow-green wavelengths, and relatively little light in the blue-violet wavelengths. To put very rough numbers on the matter, a middle-of-spec 9006 bulb operating at 12.8v produces 1000 lumens, of which approximately 250 are red, 250 are orange, 250 are yellow, 175 are green, 50 are blue and 25 are violet.
Now, suppose you want to add a filter to the glass that makes the light look bluer/colder. How does it do that? Well, there's no such thing as a filter that adds light into the beam passing through it -- filters can only suppress light, not add it. So if we can't add green-blue-violet light, then the only way to get the light to look colder is to suppress green-blue-violet's opposites, which are red-orange-yellow. If we want the light to look, let's say, 20% colder, we suppress red-orange-yellow by 20%. Looking up above, we see that we've got a total of 750 lumens' worth of red, orange and yellow. So, cutting this by 20% leaves 600 lumens, plus essentially all of the bulb's original green-blue-violet output of 250 lumens, so we've now got a bulb that produces light that looks 20% colder and produces 850 lumens.
Now, 850 lumens happens to be the minimum legal output for a 9006 (which has a spec of 1000 lumens, ± 15%). Unless we're an evil fly-by-night company that really doesn't care about quality and legality, we can't produce a bulb that produces only the bare minimum of light, because half our production will be 849 lumens or less just on account of the variances encountered in mass production. So, we have to put in a high-luminance filament to try to counteract some of the filtering losses, but we still have to come in under the max-allowable-wattage spec in DOT or ECE regulations.
So, let's say we build our 9006 with a high-zoot filament that produces 1200 lumens. That's too much for a legal 9006, but we're going to block some of those lumens with our colored filter (blue glass). This 1200-lumen filament produces, let's say, 300 lumens red, 300 lumens orange, 300 lumens yellow, 210 lumens green, 60 lumens blue and 30 lumens violet. Now we put that same blue glass over it, which suppresses red-orange-yellow by 20%. Now we've got 720 lumens' worth of red-orange-yellow after filtration, plus 300 lumens' worth of green-blue-violet. That gives us a 910-lumen bulb, which is enough above the 850-lumen legal minimum that we can run the bulb and even if some filaments only produce 1150 lumens instead of 1200, we're still legally OK. Of course, we still only have 910 lumens instead of 1000, and our 1200-lumen filament is going to have a significantly shorter life than a 1000-lumen filament, but we've got our colder/bluer light appearance in a legal bulb.
By now you probably see why filtering for yellow does not significantly reduce light output: Take our 1000-lumen 9006 as broken down by color output above. No such thing as a filter that adds extra yellow light, so we have to get our yellow by suppressing blue-violet (the particular yellow that yellow headlamp/foglamp bulbs produce, called "selective yellow" and described above, contains all the green found in white light. If we took out green, we'd have a turn signal type of amber-orange light.) OK, then, let's cut blue-violet by 80%. That means we've got our 925 lumens' worth of red-orange-yellow-green, plus 15 lumens' worth of blue-violet (after filtration). Total: 940 lumens. MUCH smaller loss! OK, so we put in a very slightly better filament, say one that produces 1060 lumens, and now we've got 980 lumens' worth of red-orange-yellow-green, plus 16 lumens' worth of blue-violet (after filtration) for a total of 996 lumens, which is for all intents and purposes identical to our original 1000-lumen uncolored bulb (a parking lamp bulb puts out as few as 30 lumens).
from experiance with RGB, blue seems to light up the "skin" of water in the air, much faster than the other colors, i dont know any science behind it, but dumping blue out of a rgb spectrum , you can see through water better, even in the creek or lake.
That is an effect of the interaction between the light and your eyes, not between the light and the water particles in the air. More info
here .
yellow fog lights really had thier biggest color advantage from showing YOUR car to others, not really helping you see anything.
Incorrect, see article linked above.
the Wide spread on "yeller" fog lights was obviously intent in making a colorised halo around your car
No. Fog lamps are illumination devices, not conspicuity devices. See
here . Of course, most any operating illumination device will provide some conspicuity, but this is incidental, and not deliberate.
"white" driving lights placed LOW too at 13-20* beam pattern were more effective than wide spread fog light to see through fog and snow
This, too, is incorrect. "Driving lights" are more properly called by their technical name, auxiliary high-beam headlamps. They produce a centre-weighted beam with no particular control of glare or backscatter, and as such, they make absolutely rotten bad-weather lights and are illegal for use in traffic, with low beams, or in inclement weather.
not everything is about raw lumens output as metered.
That is true, but assuming we keep the composite beam pattern fixed and can alter only the spectral power distribution ("color") and the overall proportional intensity, the latter is overwhelmingly the predominant factor in the safety performance of a vehicle's forward illumination system.
there is no advantage to blinding or reducing visibility of any of the 4000lb death machines humans are caged to.
Absolutely right. Glare is not the same as conspicuity (a lot of motorcycle operators conflate the two and think brighter and ever-brighter lights are the way to better safety. They are not.)
there is more, but it gets complex
It is indeed very complex, but without intending any mockery, I must ask where you are getting some of these factoids you are presenting.
Notes: silverstars are unnessisarily tinted/filtered to a microbe more blue, but the reflective cap (if you have a cap at all) does allow more light to escape than a black cap.
This is flatly wrong.
"Fog lights", can also be spotty huge round throwing lights as seen on ya big huge suv things, they are not always wide, nor low
The technical regulations governing fog lamps, particularly in North America, are quite lax. The automakers like it that way, for it permits them to cheaply offer useless "fog lamps" as high-profit cosmetic playtoys to gullible vehicle buyers.
