anyone ever get a headlight ticket?
the best bang for the buck would probably be Sylvania Silverstars
Nope, gotta disagree.
Any of the bulbs claiming to produce "extra white" light (or super white, hyper white, platinum white, metal white, xenon white, etc) as its main promotional "benefit" is best avoided. It doesn't matter whose name is on the bulb—Sylvania SilverStar/Ultra or ZxE, Philips BlueVision or CrystalVision, Wagner TruView, anything from PIAA or Hoen,, Nokya, Polarg, etc.—all the same scam. They have a blue-tinted glass, which changes the light color a little, but blocks light that would reach the road if the glass weren't tinted, so they give you
less light than ordinary bulbs (not more). To get legal-minimum levels of light through the blue glass, the filament has to be driven very hard so these bulbs have a very short lifespan, and there's nothing about the tinted light that improves your ability to see—the opposite is true (less light = less seeing, no matter about the tint). Sylvania got spanked to the tune of thirty million(!) dollars for false and misleading "upgrade" claims for Silver Star bulbs (see
here )—and they are among the least-bad of an overall bad product category, so the math kind of does itself.