In actuality candlepower has been used for a long time to convey the brightness intensity and luminescence of flashlights and other lights. The only problem is that "CANDLEPOWER" is not a scientific measurement and has been used by some companies to grossly exaggerate the brightness of their lights with absurdly large “candlepower” numbers.

Lumens is a scientifically measured value that quality manufacturers use to give an exact value to their lights. Lumens are measured with a hollow sphere that captures all available light from the source. Then a calibrated light sensor is used to give an exact value that can be verified.

Lumens are the only measurement you can use and trust to give the true brightness of a light.

http://youtu.be/sjEVJraNMsw

 

No matter how you explain it I feel they give me much more visibility at night... You can tell a huge difference from looking at street signs and anything else that is reflective... Even the eyes of animals you can see from much further away and a lot sooner than that of regular bulbs... Just my .02 cents...

 

+1 here

I agree...it gives it a better definition to the road & highway stripes/lines and especially during times when the roads are covered with snow.

 

lol when the roads are covered with snow nothing helps you see the lines painted on the roads better except for driving right behind a plow

(i mean a real amount of snow, not a dusting that you can still see through, put an inch of snow on the ground and tell me any headlight makes the lines easier to see through it, i dare you )

 

I didn't meant to say to see the highway line/stripe guides when covered by snow...I should have re-worded and added, what I meant to say is previous vehicles tire tracks which have ran over the snow you can see and follow it. Truth is HIDs gives a better definition for me especially after having LASIK done on my eyes...my 2 cents!

 

HID's 10times better. I have 6000k on my other car

 

I agree with you that Lumens is a scientific measurement, but so is candlepower and foot-candles, and Lux, and ... Lumens is a metric measurement and candle power is an english measurement. Lumens is the full output of something, and not what you see on the road (or wherever). A laser light has a huge amount of lumens, but you wouldn't want to drive your car with two lasers out front. Why? Because over the majority of the road surface they would produce zero lumens. Your lights have to lightup a large area, and so lumens are not the right measurement. You can have a 20K lumens projector at a concert, but if it's lighting a 200 ft screen, it sucks. If that same projector is used to fill a 20ft screen, it will be stunning.

Most HIDs put out more lumens than a halogen bulb, but despite that, if not properly focused with a reflector designed for that bulb they might easily not look any brighter on the road. By the same token, if you put a non-standard halogen bulb in a reflector not designed for it, you may also have reduced performance.

One more example for you. Take a MagLite. They have a powerful beam with lots of lumens. But you can focus or de-focus a MagLite. When focused you get an intense light over a small area. When de-focused you get a less intense light over a larger area. Same lumens in each case, but different candlepower/lux.

 

If you go to a store look at most of the electrical lighting, flashlights on the market, you will find that most manufacturers use lumens as their units of output. The amount of lumens is a fixed number while the candle power can be grossly inflated by simply concentrating the beam by adjusting the focus. Fewer and fewer light manufacturers are bothering to rate their products with candlepower since it is outdated and inaccurate for their measurement of light output.

The human eye responds most strongly to light nearest the 560 nanometer wavelength, which is a yellow-green color. Some manufacturers dramatize light output measurements by using candlepower units. They can get away with this because light measurement terminology is unfamiliar to most people.

But the basic concepts can be explained as follows: The science of measuring light with respect to its effect on the human eye—which responds differently according to the wavelength, or color, of that light—is called photometry. Photometry includes measuring light intensity in a particular direction (in units of candlepower or candelas) and total light energy in a particular situation (measured in lumens).

With illumination tools, a candlepower measurement doesn't necessarily indicate total light output. To illustrate this, imagine representing a flashlight's total light output as a bag of sugar. If you pour the sugar onto a table to form a cone and measure the cone's height (representing the brightest part of the flashlight beam as measured in candlepower), you still wouldn't know the total weight of the sugar (representing the total light output as measured in lumens). Conversely, if we shake the table so that the cone settles and becomes rounded, the sugar's weight (lumens) would be the same but the height (brightest part of the beam) has been lowered and spread out.

Now take half the sugar from the demonstration above and put it inside a narrow conical container taller than the loose conical piles we made earlier. Even though this narrow cone's height (candlepower measurement) is greater than the previous cones, it contains only half the sugar (lumens). Reflectors and lenses are analogous to that conical container because they can create a light beam with a high-candlepower "hot spot" that sounds good in advertisements but tells nothing about total light output or light distribution within the beam.

 

I bought some hid kits from ddm tuning(lows(H11) w/ECEs and fogs(H16)). I'll let you guys know how the install goes.

 

Post some pictures after your install I would like to see the fogs.