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Old 16th Feb 2019, 20:54
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nicolai
 
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A lot of the problems people have with bright car headlamps are due to after-market High Intensity Discharge lamps which are poorly installed. That's why the UK Government has banned after-market conversions that are problematic ( https://www.gov.uk/government/public...-hid-headlamps ). I think we can all be confident that any aircraft or landing lights would not come with problems of after-market bodgers modifying the light pattern to look fashionable. There are also regional variations in lighting design, in particular the UK requires lights to be dipped (so the main illumination has a minimum upper cut-off angle of 0.5 degrees down ) while the USA only requires a horizontal cut-off. This often makes US-specfication lights appear brighter for the same lighting power.

The "Laser" lights are not a laser shining directly onto the road (and therefore into your eyes). Here's a manufacturer's technical description (may contain self-congratulatory prose):
https://www.osram.com/am/specials/tr...logy/index.jsp
The main point is that they use a blue laser LED to illuminate a "converter" (what I suspect others might call a phosphor, as also used to "convert" UV light to a wide spectrum of visible light in a fluorescent tube) to produce a white light. They reckon that they can get higher lighting power by doing this than by generating the white light in a white LED as at present.
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