I really am not.
The lens material is wayyyyyyy far down the list of what determines whether a headlamp is legit or not. There are excellent headlamps with polycarbonate (plastic) lenses, and terrible headlamps with glass ones.
Okeh, and I know what I'm talking about because it's my job to know what I'm talking about. If my information about car lights starts being incorrect, I very quickly stop being able to buy groceries and heat my house. Obviously that won't happen if I start posting nonsense on here, but talking about car lights on here is just a byproduct of what I do in the real world.
I don't want to get in any kind of a dick-swinging contest, but I am a world-renowned expert in this field. I'm talkin' facts here—quite apart from opinions. That means the answers you get from me might not be the ones you wanted, but they damn sure will be the ones you needed, every single time. Follow my advice or don't, at your option, but.
Yeah, 100% legitimate? Sylvania got spanked to the tune of thirty million(!) dollars for false and misleading "upgrade" claims for their Silver Star bulbs (see
here) and a large proportion of their car bulb product line is flat-out illegal because they ruin the performance of whatever lamp they're installed in. But they're highly saleable, and there are legal loopholes that allow them to get away with it, and that's how to maximize shareholder returns, so that's what they do.
Fact is, 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). And Sylvania's are among the least-bad of an overall bad product category, so that $30,000,000 penalty math kind of does itself.
Except that light you think is extra bright is not doing what you think it is. Headlight performance is a lot more complex than brighter/dimmer.
The difficulty is, what we feel like we're seeing isn't what we're actually seeing. The human visual system is a lousy judge of how well it's doing. "I know what I can see!" seems reasonable, but it doesn't square up with reality because we humans are just not well equipped to accurately evaluate how well or poorly we can see (or how well a headlamp works). Our subjective impressions tend to be very far out of line with objective, real measurements of how well we can (or can't) see.
The primary factor that drives subjective ratings of headlamps is foreground light, that is light on the road surface close to the vehicle…which is almost irrelevant; it barely even makes it onto the _bottom_ of the list of factors that determine a headlamp's actual safety performance. A moderate amount of foreground light is necessary so we can use our peripheral vision to keep track of the lane lines and keep our focus up the road where it should be, but too much foreground light works against us: it draws our gaze downward even if we consciously try to keep looking far ahead, and the bright pool of light causes our pupils to constrict, which destroys our distance vision. All of this while creating the feeling that we've got "good" lights. It's not because we're lying to ourselves or fooling ourselves or anything like that, it's because our visual systems just don't work the way it feels like they work.
And it's a safety double-whammy because most poor-quality headlamps (including that junk from Octane) produce just about nothing
but foreground light: a wash of light close to the vehicle, but no concentrated hot spot to throw light down the road where you need it, so you get severely deficient seeing distance—all while you feel like you have great/superior/better lights.
You're parrotting Sylvania's advertising hype here, not stating facts. For one thing, the product is ZXE. For another, that's one of the worst-performing bulbs you can buy. The dark-blue tint blocks a significant amount of light that would otherwise reach the road, and the result is these bulbs produce near the minimum legal amounts of light. The blue tint doesn't improve the light any; it doesn't make it work better or help you see better in any way (it does the opposite).
Also, "gas-charged bulb" is meaningless marketing doubletalk. All halogen bulbs are "gas-charged" (the correct term is "gas-filled"). And the fill gas in every halogen bulb contains some Xenon—not too much, though, because beyond a certain small percentage, it starts degrading the performance and durability of the bulb. So all this "Xenon-charged", "100% Xenon", etc you see thrown around is pure BS.
DUDE! Why so hostile? I simply asked if anyone had any actual real first hand knowledge of the black crystal headlights. I don't why this has grown into such a big deal. I never said I was interested in those LED lights you like. I'm sure they're great. I just don't care for them. That's all. No saying you're a jerk or worse. Yes, I misspelled ZXE. You parrot other people while accusing me of doing the same thing and say I'm throwing around BS at the end of what?.... 3 pages of anger. If we were sitting in a couple of chairs in front of each other right now, I'm sure you'd be polite w/me too. We just disagree. Did you think I was insulting your intelligence? I was not. I do think your wrong about the Sylvania bulbs and several other things too. That doesn't mean I hate you. Or hate u soooo bad that I need to belittle you over and over. I don't hate u at all guy... Thank you for your advise - I decided to go w/ something else that I know worked well for me. Now I hope they will still work for me as good as the last ones bought. Just like not everyone builds a motor the exact same way. No need for such hate man. I wish u well and have a Merry Christmas.
