It's dangerous now headlights are so bad.  Chryslers seem to be the worst,
but maybe it's just my Chryslers. I really suppose I should add a few
old-skool headlightz to my LHS so I can see where I'm going.

That depends on which new 300 you compared: The one with halogen
headlamps, or with Xenon units.

Also, Sylvania Silverstar sealed beams and headlamp bulbs are garbage.
Your seeing with them is significantly worse than with even just
regular sealed beams-not better.

Got my Nighthawks @ Wal-Mart.

Regards,
Joe

Hmmm. I have a pretty direct line to product news out of Sylvania, and
I keep a sharp eye out for new or modified product lines, but I haven't
seen any segmented-reflector sealed beam headlamps out of Sylvania or
any of the other makers. Your M-body would take H4656 high/low and
H4651 high-beam units, and as far as I'm aware, the only Silverstar
beams in those sizes are the parabolic-reflector, lens-optic type. Show
us a picture or weblink to what you bought and let's see what it is.
(Even if Sylvania suddenly saw the light and produced an
optically-accurate reflector-optic range of sealed beams, if they are
sold under the Silverstar name, they have that light-stealing,
glare-increasing, life-cutting blue glass coating, which is a silly
marketeering gimmick that makes the lamp a nonstarter as far as
meaningful seeing performance improvement goes).

And short seeing distance, owing to Chrysler's insistence on cheap
headlamps using VOR low beam patterns instead of putting more money
into good optics and specifying VOL low beam cutoffs. The VOR is the
type with a cutoff at the top of the right side of the low beam (it's
allowed to extend horizontally over to the left, too, but it has to be
present at the top of the right side). This is basically a
straight-across cutoff, fog lamp style, aimed at the horizon. You can
get decent width, but in-lane beam reach is often poor because there's
very little light above horizontal even on the side of the beam facing
away from traffic.

VOL, the other visually-aimed low beam pattern allowed in the US, is
conceptually similar to the rest-of-world European ECE low beam: the
cutoff extends leftward from the top-center of the low beam, and is
aimed slightly below the horizon. To the right of center, the cutoff
either dissolves, steps upward, or sweeps upward at an angle. This
means in-lane seeing distance can be longer with thoughtful optical
design, because the upstep/upsweep throws light well down the right
side of your own lane.  Europe has used low beams like this since 1952
without a problem (England since '73, Australia since '71, Japan since
'90...). But when Chrysler put VOL headlamps on the Pacifica, lazy
dealers were refusing to educate customers who thought they were seeing
the left light aimed lower than the right light (they were actually
seeing the stair-step cutoff produced by BOTH lights). Rather than put
a paragraph and diagram in the owner's manual or put out a service
bulletin, Chrysler bitched to lampmakers that VOL low beams were
costing them too much money in warranty headlamp re-aims and started
specifying VORs for almost all their headlamps.

I'm still keenly interested to see what it is you have there.

Well, filtered towards the blue (not the green) by coating the bulb
glass blue. This suppresses the yellow light which is most effective at
making the human visual system work, but allows the marketeers to
babble about "closer to natural sunlight" and "the look of expensive
HID" and blahbitty blah blah blah.

I believe it. Though, to be perfectly fair, sealed beam headlamps in
general aren't very precise optical instruments under the best of
conditions, and most of them are poorly made on old tooling nowtimes.
For anyone who cares, here is a report I wrote up after doing some
dissective analysis of various sealed beams a couple years ago:

This is a report of the results of disassembly and analysis of several
different 200mm x 142mm (2B1) rectangular sealed beams.

GE has recently released a new line ("Nighthawk") of high performance
bulbs and sealed beams. Their beam formation is certainly better in
several respects than other sealed beams: Overall focus is definitely
better, the hot spot is reasonably well shaped and placed and is
intense,
and the beam is considerably wider. There is no efficacy-reducing blue
glass in the lens, reflector or burner envelope (such blue glass is
found
in e.g. Sylvania Silverstar and Wagner TruView).

Foreground light is still rather lacking with the NightHawk, but the
bigger inadequacy is that a mask is not used during aluminization, so
the
optically useless floor and ceiling of the lamp are covered with shiny
stuff, same as the parabolic reflector. Therefore, light from the
filaments hits the floor and ceiling and is emitted from the headlamp
as
optically uncontrolled upward stray light, which causes glare and
backdazzle in bad weather.

In the 1970s when the idea of rectangular sealed beam headlamps was
being
discussed as a possibility, there was scarcely any objection to this
big
increase in stray light which does not exist with round lamps that have
no
floors and ceilings. The only concerns voiced were to do with marketing
and interchangeability. This is probably because halogen sealed beams
were
still far in the future at the time, and it is much easier to put an
effective filament shield (rain cap, fog cap) on filaments that are not
enclosed in a halogen capsule. The tungsten sealed beams had beam
patterns
with a great deal of uplight, but very little vertical stray light,
because the filament shielding was good. Halogen sealed beams all rely
on
the poor shielding job done by the blacktop at the forward end of the
burner. Not that an effective bulb shield *couldn't* be incorporated
into
a halogen sealed beam -- it's been done in European-spec sealed beams
in
the past, and Koito made some DOT H6052s with bulb shields for
Mitsubishi in the mid-
1980s -- but nobody does so in current-production sealed beams.

One of the goals of this experiment was to mask the floor, ceiling and
other optically-useless and distorted areas to observe the effect on
glare and backdazzle.

The lenses were removed from the reflectors of a GE standard 6052, a GE
NightHawk H6054NH and a Sylvania XtraVision H6054XV.

NB- GE stopped making nonhalogen sealed beam headlamps some time back;
everything uses a halogen burner now, even the ones in "standard
tungsten"
boxes. These lamps now use twin-transverse-filament halogen burners
with
the wattage and flux adjusted to approximate the characteristics of the
previous nonhalogen assemblies. As is the case with most halogen sealed
beams, beam focus and stray light are worse than tungsten non-halogen
beam
units, and they suffer from all the problems endemic to most US sealed
beam headlamps:  Poor beam focus with excessive uplight and upward
stray
light.

The unlensed beam of the 6052 is a very poorly focused diagonal(!)
oblong
of "blotchy" light (gradients/streaks within the oblong). There's just
no
way to get anything even remotely approaching a well-defined beam
pattern
out of this. The best one can do is use the lens optics to shift enough
light away from the upward-leftward area to comply minimally with the
glare maxima. Heel distortion in the reflector was evident and can't
have
been helping any, either. Then add in the aforementioned floor and
ceiling
reflections *plus* light escaping the burner and travelling directly
through the lens, and the resultant beam pattern is a sick joke.

Next, the Night Hawk H6054NH. I applied power and examined the unlensed
beam. These lamps use a burner with C8/C8 twin axial filaments --
essentially an HB5 burner of 65/55w, emitting an estimated 1400/1100
lumens high/low beam. The unlensed beam itself was very impressive: a
tight, centrally-focused round spot of light with moderate "fingers"
upwards and downwards. Not so impressive was the amount of stray light
coming primarily from the reflectorized floor, directly and via the
reflectorized ceiling, also directly from the filaments (see bulb
shield comments above).

I used some high-heat-resistant matte black paint on the lamp's floor,
ceiling, distorted reflector heel directly behind the burner, burner
legs
and grommets, and the small distorted areas of the reflector directly
in
front of the locating lugs. The resultant unlensed beam pattern
exhibited
considerably less stray light outside the beam pattern, while the beam
pattern itself was scarcely changed (visually -- no photogonio range
available).

Next, I took a look at a Sylvania Xtravision H6054XV headlamp. This
lamp
uses a twin-transverse C6/C6 burner -- essentially an HB1 burner but
with
a 65/55w high/low filament pair emitting an estimated 1300/1000 lumens.
The beam pattern from the assembly is very poorly formed and focused.
The
hot zone is large, poorly defined and of low peak intensity, there is a
large and intense vertical spike of light, absolutely zero cutoff and
*very* high levels of upward stray and flare light outside the beam
pattern.

Therefore, I was surprised when I separated the lens from the reflector
to
find that the unlensed beam is very tight and well focused -- a
properly
oriented (horizontal and square with the vertical and horizontal)
"bowtie"
of light as one might expect to see from a transverse filament placed
on
the focus of a parabolic reflector. Stray light levels remained fairly
high owing to near-heel distortions in the reflector and ghost images
(reflections of the transverse filaments in the burner envelope glass,
subsequently picked up and distributed by the reflector).

I used matte black paint on the floor and ceiling, the distorted
reflectorized area of the heel, and the burner "legs". This reduced
reflected upward stray light considerably, but a considerable amount
still
remained since the levels were initially very high and ghost images
from
transverse filaments cannot be really effectively be dealt with -- the
only way to mitigate or eliminate them is to use a burner with
spherical
rather than tubular glass, and no such burners exist. Of course, as was
the case with the GE NightHawk, the addition of black masking material
to
reflective but optically-useless areas of the reflector/housing did
nothing to attenuate the stray light coming directly from the
filaments. A
halfway job of containing this light was effected by masking the inside
of
the lens rim, but a bulb shield is really the only way to do the whole
job.

Prescription factors in beam formation were verified by placing
different
lenses in front of different reflectors. Using the lens from the
standard
nothing-special GE H6052 headlamp with the *reflector-burner* from the
Sylvania H6054XV Xtravision headlamp resulted in a much better focused
and
formed beam pattern than from the Xtravision lens. Both of these lenses
were designed for use with transverse filaments. Using the GE NightHawk
lens in front of the Xtravision burner-reflector yielded a less
well-formed beam (this lens was designed for axial filaments).

Using the Xtravision lens in front of the transverse-filament GE H6052
burner-reflector resulted in a poorly-focused, poorly-formed beam.

Conclusions:

Rectangular reflectors (those with floors and/or ceilings) need masks
during the aluminization stage of production to keep shiny stuff off
optically useless surfaces where it causes upward stray and glare
light.
Bulb shields are feasible and should be used. And, the Sylvania
Xtravision
lens prescription is garbage!

(NB- the Silverstar beams use Sylvania's standard lens, not an
Xtravision type. Focus is just as poor, but differently so.)

Do a websearch on H4656NH and you should turn up some sources. Or you
could put in some decent H4s. Bosch makes good ones in your size format
and they shouldn't be too hard to find.

DS