A 10000K headlight bulb sounds like it should be twice as bright as a 5000K bulb but this isn’t the case, at least not to our human eyes. Color temperatures have little to do with brightness. However, they affect visibility, hue, and other things when used in lighting.
Many drivers don’t understand color temperatures and this makes it easy for them to buy LED bulbs with the wrong hue.
In this article, we’ll be explaining the theory behind color temperature and why it’s an important consideration when buying LED headlight bulbs. We’ll also look at common LED headlight color temperatures and discuss which one might be better for your headlights.
The concept of color temperature comes from the theory of the colors that would be emitted if some idealized material (called a black body radiator) was heated to different temperatures. Heating a metal can approximate this idea.
When a metal is heated, it starts red hot before turning orange, then yellow, then white, and even blue if it gets hot enough. These color changes are due to changes in the wavelength of the radiation emitted by the material as it heats up.
