And therein lies the rub: a white or whiteish output doesn't mean it's the brightest output. In fact, often times the coatings used to achieve that color will actually reduce the light output of the bulb.

You'll actually want your lights to be somewhat yellow, as light with a higher color temperature doesn't offer very good inclement weather visibility. On wet roadways, ZXE's and the like are terrible for visibility. I take it a step further, and have installed fog light bulbs that put out selective yellow light, but that's just me.

 

I agree that anything over 4300k worthless. I think the ZXE's are 4k. Sylvania also totally redesigned the Ultra bulbs. They used to be completely light blue with a goldish tip. Now they have a clear spot for low beam, and the high beam (9003/H4) is located in the light blue tint. Haven't tried those newly designed Ultra's. I so wish we could retrofit JW Speaker type LED's into our LR's!

 

Yea, that's true about the temp. I've got an HID conversion (with projectors) with around 5k bulbs which are great when it's clear and dry, but I put a 3k (yellow) kit in my fogs to offset that. The combo works exceptionally well in pretty much all conditions.

 

Yep when it's bad out the fogs come on, when it's really nasty out the aux driving lights come on (of coarse not with oncoming traffic).

Biggest thing around here lately is rednecks running around at night with 52inch light bars on, that ARE NOT aimed low or at all causing you feel like your driving into the sun....

Back when I had a Jeep Wrangler I messed with HID's, but once I got the setup good the darn ballast would act up. I finally dropped 1k into some JW Speaker 8700's and omg it was amazing!!! You could see everything!! Well worth the $$$ because around here in TX lots of animals from deer to a cow can just walk right out into the road at night!! If I had the time and $$$ I'd do a JW LED conversion into a D1/D2.

Only issue I had with the JW's was if u had to winch at night you'd have to turn em off and run aux lights or fogs because the JW's would flicker like a disco show. Maybe they've fixed that, but besides that they were truly amazing. When I now drive my H3, D1, or D2 I'm like geez lol.