Amber lights, style or functional?

Guys… this might be a dumb question ‍♂️ But here it goes. What’s with all the amber lights? Like amber pods, amber in light bars, grilles, etc. is it a style thing or do they offer any light performance characteristics? Thanks!

 

People say they cut through fog, "science" behind it is that amber reflects less off particles in air (dust, moisture).

The amber lights always have less output that their white counterparts per manufacturer specs.

Best bet is trying both and seeing what you like. Amber is far more popular on Instagram at the moment.

 

Found this interesting article thought it might be an interesting topic for you all to research.

It says human eye can see better blue'ish/ white spectrum at night vs yellow'ish / amber light. Found few more relative articles that might be boring to the forum but something you can search.
Some articles says blueish white LED will make roads safer than yellow lights. This blueish white LED keep the body clock active / drivers more awake.

Here's the first article and you can take key words from this and search more if interested.
(Scotopic Vision = Night Vision | Photopic vision = Day time Vision)

https://light-measurement.com/spectral-sensitivity-of-eye/

 

I love yellow lighting For night, fog, rain, snow... I just can't see for shit at night with 6000k white light.

Amber is orange such as turn signals, imo.



My headlights are 9011 halogen, much better then oem halogen. And diode dynamics pro fogs yellow

 

Interesting. I wonder if this might explain the blue-white lights they are using at street intersections in my area. It’s almost violet-blue, very odd lighting. Odd enough that it makes me think that public works is changing lighting as a result of research findings.

It’s true that an awake driver sees things much better than one that’s asleep . However, better alertness/awakeness resulting from blue-white light should not be generalized to mean that it’s the best color for artificial lighting.

The function of artificial lighting needs to be taken into account, along with the effects of particular colors on the viewers perception of certain target features of what is being lit. Lighting has to be able to reveal what we are actually seeking to see. The brain has to make meaning of what is being lit.

In other words, answering X color is best for Y condition, is not a question that should be limited to physics and the neuro-biology of the eye. Scientific study of these aspects of lighting start moving into the fields of human factors/neuro-psych/human perception.

 

Out here in So Cal in areas where we get a lot of fog the street lights seem to have a Yellow/Orange hue to them, I don’t know if they automatically change to that color when the fog gets thick but I do notice the color when I’m working a night job.

 

Are the Pro fogs a wider beam pattern than OEM?

 

Crazy wide

 

For me, fog. Had a horrible pocket of fog about a year ago. It was maybe 30-40 min through it on i5 and my ambers crushed it while my whites felt like they reflected back to me.

I’m up in mammoth this weekend and they have crazy fog out at Lake Crowly this morning and again my ambers crushed it. Wife gave the nod to swap out all my whites for “safety” so I’m a happy guy.

 

Most do it because they think it looks cool.

 

This is probably fine in clear conditions. But, water reflects blue light better than yellow light, making yellow better for fog and wet conditions. It really depends on the light's purpose.

Actually, those are probably defective. Apparently, a bunch of street lamps have been manufactured with some kind of defect causing them to turn purple/violet. I think they're all going to be replaced, eventually. Here's one of several articles about it:

https://www.greenbaypressgazette.co...ortheastern-and-central-wisconsin/9225015002/

 

Wow, really!?!? There are a ton of them around here. This is actually kinda funny since their placement seems to look so intentional. Thanks for the link!

 

Yeah, it's like all of them in some areas! I'd hate to be the company that installed them!

As much as I love LED's, we've had some serious quality issues with them. We had to replace every light in a 500,000 square foot warehouse awhile back. I also did a library where about 10-15% of the drivers were junk right out of the box.

It's been an interesting transition. I'm still 100% in favor of LED's, though.

 

As a 50+ auto enthusiast. I have known for decades that amber lights are superior in fog.

I immediately replaced the bulbs in my driving lights with amber H11 bulbs since I encounter fog frequently on my commute.

I have noticed an increase in seeing them on other vehicles. I am skeptical that they're for practical use rather than for looks since I've seen most of them on when the weather is good.

 

Maybe a myth-
https://youtu.be/Dv23bSVXTsw

 

No. It is not a myth.

And, this is yet another example of why I don't pay much attention to YouTube bloggers. They tend to know just enough to sound smart, and then people believe everything they say.

And then, there's guys who don't even sound smart (example R4T), and people still believe what they say.

Here's an excerpt from one of many articles that explain the benefit of yellow fog lights:


"Why Are JDM Fogs Yellow?
Some people incorrectly believe that JDM fog lights are yellow for purely aesthetic reasons (people tend to either love or hate the yellow light look).

For example, how good does this R34 GTR look with yellow fog lights? (Read our article here on why the Nissan Skyline is illegal in the United States for more information about this legendary car)



However, the real reason is to do with making fog lights more effective.

Long story short, yellow fog lights improve drivers’ vision in foggy conditions, heavy rain or snow, when compared to white fog lights.

As you might recall from school science class, visible light is made up of a spectrum of colours.



If you shoot a beam of light through a prism, you get the cover art to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album:



What is important to understand here is that not all light colours are processed in the same way by the eye.


The colours with shorter wavelengths (blue indigo and violet) are harder for the eyes to process correctly.

When you see something reflected back at you in blue light, it appears fuzzy because of how the eyes process this light.

The colours with shorter wavelengths (blue indigo and violet) are harder for the eyes to process correctly.

When you see something reflected back at you in blue light, it appears fuzzy because of how the eyes process this light.



With that blue light removed, everything has a yellowish tinge which is easier for the eye to process and does not have the same tendency to cause glare.

This is why fog lights – including JDM ones – have historically been yellow.

When you illuminate the area in front of your car with a yellow fog light, that light is not going to cause as many problems in terms of pushing glare back at your eyes, making the driving process easier and less stressful.

In fact, there is actually a name for this specific yellow colour – “Selective Yellow” (you can read more about the science behind Selective Yellow on Wikipedia)."


If you want to run useless blue fogs, go for it. I actually find that I don't even like blue-ish headlights. Maybe they're fine in small doses. But, I drive at night more than most people. I prefer a neutral white.

 

So real time test. Last summer while up in Northern California driving thru super thick coastal fog at night. I was running just my headlights and the fog seemed like a wall in front of me, I turned on my Amber / Yellow DD fogs and bam it was a night and day difference with the fogs on. I also do not run the fogs unless there is fog, snowing or heavy rain. I don’t run them because they look cool.

 

Thanks for that.

Here’s an excerpt about selective yellow (not amber) and fog lights from lighting expert Daniel Stern:

“Selective yellow light can improve a driver's ability to see in fog or rain or snow, but not because it 'penetrates fog better' or 'reflects less off droplets'. In fact it's because of the way the human eye processes different colours of light. Blue, indigo, and violet are difficult for the human optical system to process correctly. They are the shortest visible wavelengths and tend to focus in front of our retina rather than upon it. To demonstrate this to yourself, after dark find a deep blue storefront sign or blue lights on an airport runway or something else that's a deep blue light emitter against a dark background in the absence of white light—from any appreciable distance, it's almost impossible for your eyes to see the blue lighted object as a sharply defined form;the edges blur. The blur effect is not present with nearby signs or lights of colours other than blue.

Blue also is a very difficult colour of light to look at; it stimulates the reaction we call glare. Within the range of allowable white light, bluer headlamps have been shown to be 46% more glaring than yellower ones for a given intensity of light. So, it seems culling the blue out of the spectrum lightens the optical workload and reduces glare.”

http://www.danielsternlighting.com/tech/lights/light_color/light_color.html

 

Yellow lights best suited for rain or fog but many LeMans cars use them at night:

 

This makes me feel a bit better. When I switched my house to interior LED 5 or 6 years ago (cant remember), I thought changing light bulbs would be a thing of the past. But for the first few years I was having lots of failures and started to get frustrated. I guess I’m changing them out less often now…although I have a pair of lights in the hallway that just gave up the ghost…wonder how old those are…

 

Their headlight color is based on class requirements, not driver preference.

 

Luckily, they seem to be getting better. At least the energy savings usually makes up the cost.

 

Drove home from work the other night and it was foggy, so took some photos of the difference between low-beams and no amber lights, low-beams and LED light bar, and low-beams and amber lights.

First is regular low-beams...



Then with the LED light bar lit...



Then finally with low-beams and amber driving lights turned on...



Barely any difference with the ambers on camera, but significantly worse with the light bar on. When driving, I noticed a much bigger difference with the amber lights on, but it is not as discernible on camera. Same with the light bar on; I could barely see with all of the glare.

 

What a wonderful thread. I spent 25 years in France and when I first arrived there thirty years ago all vehicles had yellow headlights. Not just the fog lights, but the regular driving lights. It was as if I had entered another world. Last night I was watching the 1979 Classic "Memoirs of a French Whore" (La dérobade) and there's a scene with a 1960s Ford Mustang with yellow headlights - notice the parked Peugeot has yellow headlights as well:



The French law mandating yellow headlights was in effect from 1937 until the European Union forced France to homologate their vehicles with the rest of Europe in 1993. Now 30 years later it is rare to see yellow headlights.

Here is a 1990 episode of Top Gear explaining the law in France:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vArQgTQVYcw&t=228s

I personally prefer yellow fog lights mounted as low as possible to get under the fog and illuminate the road. Properly mounted white fog lights work as well but are not as effective reducing glare and refraction in my experience.

 

This looks like the perfect situation for amber fogs! Why not use those over amber driving lights?

 

This makes a lot of sense to me. When working under vehicles for anything other than an oil change, I usually use a drop light. The one I used for years was just a regular incandescent lamp bulb, which emits a soft yellow light (and breaks easily ). Many moons ago my FIL gave me a drop light with strips of bright white LEDs as a gift. I remember using it a few times and it was like everything became 2-dimensional and monochromatic. I couldn’t use it because it was impossible to see what I was doing. Mind you, this was probably mid-2000s when LEDs weren’t as refined as they are now. The LED lights I have now are much softer and have a yellower hue to them.

 

I notice this with the headlights on my Chevy (Silverado, work truck). The headlights are plenty bright, but I feel much more comfortable with the 4Runner's headlights. The bulbs in the 4runner are more of a neutral/softer white (lower color temperature).

 

Here's a little read on the subject from the master - Daniel Stern. Convinced me to go with Selective Yellow many moons ago and I never went back.

Daniel Stern Lighting Consultancy and Supply

 

Interesting Thread. Not for fog necessarily, but the yellow/amber reminds me of the so-called night vision glasses I wear occasionally. They are really handy on big city interstate highways at night. They really cut the glare down and make images sharper. Don't know how they would work under fog conditions. Probably not. They are designed to just cut glare. And they seem to work well for that purpose.