95 dodge ram // i had a headlight burn out. i would like the brightest i can get, but i want to just buy bulbs to plug right in. no convertion kits or anything. any suggestions???
go with what book says for bulb.a brighter one puts out more heat and could cause you problems. ie melting plastic.
The standard bulbs (legal bulbs) are 55 watts. Blinding oncoming drivers is a “right” you do not have…Try Sylvania “silver Stars” or something like that…More importantly, replace or clean up the plastic lens covers…They make products just for that purpose…
Unless you are willing to try a higher wattage and risk melting your housings and annoying other drivers, your only real choices are operating temperature and bulb coating color. Hotter filaments run more blue, which most people like for driving, but the bulbs don’t last as long. A conventional bulb with a blue coating gives about the same effect. Some folks like yellow coatings, similar affect to fog lights but not nearly so yellow.
I use Silverstar Ultras, which give a light that is similar to natural sunlight in color. The original Silverstars lasted about 5 years in my Volvo. Silvania just recently started selling Ultras, and I have only one set so far, so I don’t know how long they will last.
I read a tech article on why the “blue” color seems to bother people more. It’s a frequency thing, the frequency of that blue light causes “ghost” or "leftover"images to remain in your eyes longer than other light frequencys.
Of course any coating on the bulb to change the color works by reducing the total light. If you put a blue coating on a bulb, it does not make any more blue light, but it just filters out other colors resulting in less total light.
In addition to which, blinding oncoming traffic does not do a lot for enhancing one’s safety. If oncoming drivers can’t see where they are going, there is a pretty good chance that what they run into will be the guy with the overly bright bulbs who is blinding them. I’d suggest ignoring the pleasant jackass on the TV who tells us that the brighter bulbs he is peddling will make us safer, and replacing the bulb with exactly the same bulb type that was there originally.