Why is 6k+ white light so popular?

Mid day sun is approximately 5500 Kelvin. If all headlights were the same color temperature, they would all look white to us. We, as humans do an automatic white point adaptation, where our brains tell us that something bright and close to white actually IS white. It's only when we see one light next to another that one appears warmer or cooler than the other. We only have relative color acuity for vision, unlike the few musician who actually have perfect pitch. Driving home Tuesday night from Monterey there were long stretches of road with no other cars and after a few minutes (seconds really) the GE+130 H11's in my truck, which measure 3416 Kelvin on my Sekonic C700U appear to be white. The big problem I see with many LED's is not their color temperature per se, it's that they are missing so many portions of the color spectrum. My guess is that even though they have a nominal Kelvin of 6000K, it's those missing chunks of spectrum that our brains object to. I know that there are LED emitters that have a fuller spectrum like those used in the film industry, but I'm also pretty certain they are far too expensive for use in automotive headlights. If I had the meter with me now, I'd pull off a couple of the spectrum charts that illustrate this, but suffice to say that daylight from mid day sun is a pretty flat curve from one end of the visible spectrum to the other - ultra violet to infrared and halogen is the same except the curve is more or less a straight line that slopes down toward the blue end of the spectrum, indicating the lower amount of blue in that light source. What daylight and halogen have in common are no gaps at all in the spectral range. That Sekonic meter is quite inexpensive at approximately $1500, but it seems to be pretty good overall and is the industry standard for film and still photography.

 

5000k perfect between 4.5/5.5k

 

Matter of opinion or fact? I dont see it as popular at all. Again, opinion

 

Man looking at the retrofit source website 6500k looks closer to the DRLs, but i really dont want to go past 6k

 

Guess the color of the HID’s.

 

I could care less what color temp others are running. To each his own.

 

Unfortunately, the photo posted above means nothing. All it means is that the white balance on the camera is approximately correct for the color of the light source. The metadata on the image only says that it's in Display P3, which means it probably came from a iPhone, not the right tool for what you're trying to illustrate, and it only further underscores that I wrote a few minutes ago. You could shoot three different photos with three vastly different Kelvin bulbs in the same lights and end up with virtually the same photo. And even if you shoot RAW captures with manual exposures and process them all the same in the same RAW processor, that won't give you a Perceptual evaluation of that you think you saw. This lighting shit is tricky, even when you've been doing it for decades.

 

If you are referring to my photo, yes, it was an iphone. But, it’s a pretty accurate representation of the Morimoto 4500k HID in the stock halogen housing. It’s a little yellow compared to the 5500k but I found it was nice and bright.

My goal was to improve the brightness but not so much so that oncoming traffic was annoyed and flashing their brights at me.

They were perfect. Highly recommend the kit from the retrofit source.

 

Yeah in the photo they match the DRL nicely, but in person there is a noticable difference in my opinion.

 

I had 5k hids initially but it had a slight blue tint so I went with 4800k and don’t notice any blue or yellow tint.

5-5500k for reverse and interior lights