being a fully trained lighting guy, you can trust this advice.

sealed beam headlights when new are about 3000 Kelvin, but they dull off after age to be around the 2600K mark. if you also have the halogen high beams then you can convert to whatever globes you want across all your lights and generally even get close to matching parking globes too.

in order to stray from your question and go technical for a moment, the bluer (or 'whiter' as the auto industry suggests) the globe is then the less bright it actually becomes. light output isnt measured in colour tempature this is simply a perception that a whiter tone must be 'brighter'. this notion is simply sales BS that is far from correct - especially with filament based globes.

in order to make a globe bright white they take a standard white globe ~3000K colour temp and apply a blue filter to tint the light output, in doing so they limit the amount of lumens the globe itself produces. this lumens figure is the actual brightness of the globe. to put it in simpler terms, the colour temp value (or brightness) is literally a figure for the tone of the colour, but for illumination distance and overall brightness its the lumen value thats important

have a look at http://www.narva.com.au/products/bro...ormance-globes and they have a little graph that indicates colour temp against lumen output for their globes. the thing to note is how their 'brightest' blue globe is actually the least bright in lumens. this is because the blue filter is cutting out the majority of the red and green spectrum from the natural white light.

I currently have standard 3000k 50w globes in my van (H4 outers and H1? inners) these are fair brighter tha the old sealed ones i used to have.

skiman