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Quote:
"The new NightBreaker bulbs are not quite as good as the Philips Xtreme Power in terms of raw light output, but the difference is almost unmeasurable and certainly imperceptible in terms of actual headlamp performance. The Osram Night Breaker has areas of blue glass which take away from your seeing performance, rather than augmenting it as the promotional material claims—so-called "whiter" light created by blue filtration like this does not help you see better—so purely on performance, the Xtreme Power wins. Both of these bulbs have the best available output from a standard-wattage bulb, and a short lifespan
(no free lunch). For stock or near-stock wattage bulbs in headlamps, the best beam performance comes from the following bulbs:
H1: Philips Xtreme Power
H3: Narva Rangepower+50
H4: Osram 70/65w +50
H7: Osram 65w
H11: Substitute H9
Best-pick differs for other applications (fog lamps, etc.) and I don't mean to say the Night Breakers are bad bulbs, it's just Osram kind of got painted into a corner by Philips' minimal use of blue glass in their premium Xtreme Power line, and figured they had to make a bulb that looked significantly different to avoid a "me too" perception, so they cast their lot with larger use of blue glass and revved up the hype machine about "whiter" light.
As for the various "plus" claims (+30, +50, +80, +90, etc.) keep in mind how they're devised. The plus-numbers cannot be attained simply through greater luminous flux, because of flux and wattage restrictions contained in bulb regulations prevailing worldwide. The "Plus" bulbs do produce near the maximum allowable flux but that's obviously not the whole story. These bulbs have higher filament luminance and give better beam focus because the filament coilitself is smaller. Headlamp optics are calculated based on a point source. The smaller the filament, the more closely it approximates a point source, and therefore the better the focus of the resultant beam pattern. The better the focus of the beam pattern, the higher the beam peak intensity (that is, the brighter the "hot spot"). Depending on the particular bulb and the specific headlamp optic in use, the gain in hot spot intensity can indeed be up to 50% (80%, 90%, whatever) at some specific but not uniform or predictable point in the beam. In practice, that means once Osram or Philips or whoever have designed their newest bulb, they throw the nearest convenient intern in a room with a bunch of headlamps and have him photometer them until the one that gives the single greatest increase (at any point in the beam!) is found, then they give the intern a food pellet as a reward. Tungsram called their 2nd-generation upgrade H4 "+60" either because they were lying or because they found a headlamp for a 1983 Tatra or something that had 60% more light in one particular spot. That doesn't mean the Tungsram "+60" H4 was better than the "+50" bulbs from Philips, Osram, and Narva—it wasn't! So, those "+30" and "+50" and "+80" type numbers are not necessarily a trick or a scam, it just doesn't mean what most people assume it means.
As for the blue glass, here's a refresher on the science:
There is no magical blue absorption filter that somehow blocks less light than other blue absorption filters of the same colour
characteristics. All of the extra light from the "plus" bulb construction and then some is stolen by blue filter glass, whether the blue filter is made by Philips or Osram or one of the less-reputable factories.
Filament bulbs that have been filtered to produce "whiter" (colder/bluer) light colour, and which comply with DOT or ECE regulations, can be classified in two categories:
A) The kind that produces less light than an unfiltered bulb and has rather a shorter lifespan
B) The kind that produces almost the same amount of light as an unfiltered bulb and has an extremely short lifespan.
There are no "extra white" filtered bulbs that produce identical lumens to an unfiltered bulb and have the same lifespan
Glowing filaments produce a great deal of light in the red-orange-yellow-green wavelengths, and only very little light in the blue-violet wavelengths. To put very rough numbers on the matter, suppose that a 9006 bulb produces its nominal 1000 lumens, of which 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. Unless we're a completely stinky Chinese company that really doesn't give a rat's patoot about it, we can't produce a bulb that produces only the bare minimum of light, because 50% of production will be 849 lumens or less owing to the realities of 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 super-duper filament that produces 1200 lumens. That's too much for a 9006, but we're going to take away some of those lumens with our filter-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 "floor" that we can mass-produce 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.
I bet by now you see why filtering for yellow does not significantly reduce light output: Take our 1000-lumen 9006 as broken down by colour 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", contains all the green found in white light. If we took out some of the 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 uncoloured bulb (a parking light bulb puts out between 25 and 50 lumens).
Lumen output is less than standard for colourless-glass Long Life bulbs for a different reason: The changes made to the filament to extend its life reduce its surface luminance, decreasing light output and CCT. They also defocus the beam pattern, resulting in shorter seeing distance, because the filament coil is larger. This is exactly opposite what's going on with the +30, +50, +80 type bulbs as described above."
From:
PointedThree - Osram Introduces 90% Brighter Halogen Bulbs
Osram Night Breaker Bulbs
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