Here is the deal... and I hope I don't offend anyone. For everyone who spent $1-$300 on HID "kits" you were ripped off. You have less usable light on the road, and you have blinding conditions for everyone else on the road. I can see and HID kit coming from a mile away. The worst is when I see it coming from a motorcycle. The light is so intense it almost makes me aim for them to stop the blinding light. To all the people who say their HID kits are brighter, you are right. THey are! But they are no focused. Brighter light doesnt meant more visibility. The only right way to get HID lights into our trucks is to do a complete retrofit. THis takes time, money and a lot of effort. Here is the retrofit I did with Acura TL Bixenons, bulbs and ballasts. They are hooked up so you can use the aiming screws on the stock headlights. And yes they are for sale. If I get another warning for it, so be it. But someone deserves the light that I have had on my truck the last 3 years. Oh, and you can flip the brights on and off as fast as your fingers can move with no harm. The only thing that moves is a shield that is controlled by a solenoid.

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that is one very clean retrofit!!! very nice job!

that is how HID is supposed to look! alot better light focus than my cheap *** ebay kit!

how hard of a job was that to do?

 

Your wife's Range Rover has projector headlamps v.s. the typical reflector headlamps we see so often. Projector headlamps use a smallish reflector behind the lamp and a spefically designed lens in front of the lamp to project a very controlled beam pattern. Projector headlamps have nothing to do with HD v.s. halogen, they just allow for a very compact design that you see in some of the sportier, more compact vehicles. (They are especially common in higher end motorcycles because of space) In the Range Rover it allows the to combine the headlamps with foglamps, etc, in the same space. The lens in projector lamps are very critical in design and can be very good or very, very bad with lots of hot spots and very sharp cut-off that leaves you in the dark in a bump or dip.
Metal-Halide (HID) is just a more energy efficient method of producing light and allows for a variety of higher Kelvin lamp temperatures.
Because of the way the human eye works, we see blue better than red at night; this is called percieved brightness and doesn't equate to actual lumen output. That is why the 'bluer' lights (even halogen) appear brighter to our eyes.
A good reflector headlamp is large (bigger reflectors are generally more efficient) and leads to packaging issues on vehicles (especially motorcyles) but a good reflector will generally out perform a projector (let the flaming begin) that is why racecars (off-road, Lemans, etc.) generally use reflector type headlamps or accessory lights.
A well-desgned HID lamp that CORRECTLY (a big if) places the lamp envelope in the right position compared the stock halogen lamp will perform just fine.

 

You make a lot of great points in this. I also agree, I huge reflector housing used in off road applications def can throw out tons of lumens. They use the HID in a relflector because it is more efficient, and gives off less heat. They also do not have a filament! Metal filaments do no like to be bounced around. I break house light bulbs all the time when I am clumsy. HID is just gas, that bounces around and heats up. It will never break from vibration. As far as using dual projectors on high end motorcycles... it is plain stupid. I have riden the Ducatti 1198s, the new yamaha R1, and their dual projectors blow! As soon as you lean into a turn, the cutoff beam goes with the angle of the bike allowing you to see close to nothing! What a terrible design. If I had it my way, which may have been done is. I would have a low beam in a HID projector for straight riding, and a high beam in a halogen reflector. When my high beams are on on my bike, I want to flood as much light out there as possible to see into turns.
The reason HID projectors work so well in cars is becaue of the crisp cut off beam. The shield allows you to throw light exactly where you want it, right below the eye of oncoming drivers. A bixenon is awesome, because once there are no drivers, you can move the shield and allow full light to come out of the projector in a focused yet less sharp beam.

And as far as color... correct me if I am wrong, but stock HID on cars all is from 4300k-4900K That is basically the same color as daylight. Anything over that you begin to loose lumens. Some cars are bluer than others, and it is because of the way the projectors focus the light. But you can definitley go up to 6000K and still have enough light and get a good color on the road.

4600K on my truck
they look blue

 

The easiest way to understand this whole HID, reflector projector nonsense is like this. Think of a reflector and a projector as a pair prescription eye glasses. They are made specifically for each application, whether it is the shape of the glass projector, or the positioning of the bulb in that housing. When you begin to mess with this, you will no longer have the same focused light you once had.

 

I agree on the projector design for motorcycles, I commute on a '06 Triumph Sprint ST (just clicked over 58,000 miles) and they would work great if you never leaned.
(But I don't want to ride a Hardly Ableson!)
I guess you just have to have a good memory in the twisties.

As far as color goes, the accepted standard for daylight is 5000 kelvins.
(Noon daylight, no clouds)
Actually Metal Halide (uncoated lamp) burns in the neighborhood of 6500 kelvins, depending on lamp wattage, ballast, etc.

As far as lamp envelope positioning (where the part that is really bright is in the lamp) in theory there are worldwide standards for those dimensions; in practice no so much...............and that is one of the reasons why the hybrid HID/Halogen high/low beam lamps don't work so well; they can't get both light sources where they belong.
The movable high/low HID lamps actually get the lamp envelope closer to the right position...................if they actually work after a month or so.....

 

That goes to show that the Kelvin rating that manufacturers give these lamps is not verry accurate. Of course its also hard for a camera to capture the color properly and also go through whatever photo editing software you use and then for the resulting monitor users are looking at it to reproduce the color properly. I can make lights look quite a bit different color just by changing the shutter speed on the camera, for example.

HID's are not true sources of light that follow whats called the Planckian locus and as such a 'Kelvin' rating is just an approximation. Actually many HIDs tested with various meters completely fooled the meter from being able to read its color temperature because thier spectral output deviates so much. For example if you ploted the light output in intensity vs wavelength on a graph, a halogen would be a gradual sloping line centered down low, 2000-3000K i forget exactly. But look at a HID and you will find the graph will be spikey and not smooth at all. These spectral spikes greatly influence the apparent color, and every bulb type is unique. Two different brands of 6500K bulbs can vary greatly.

Not that any of this technical stuff matters to a great degree, except for the further you deviate from 'white' your visibility may go down.

 

The type of projectors has a huge effect on the actual visual color. I can take a bulb from one projector to another projector and they look completely different.

 

Well that I dont have a whole lot of experience with, most of my HID and metal halide lighting experience is from using reflectors only (think aquarium lighting). My first guess would be the different projectors might be focused a little different and picking up hot/cold spots in the bulb (basically the bulb isnt perfectly uniform), or else the lenses are filtered differently (I'm not sure if automotive HID have UV filters in the bulb or the lens...).

 

The past 4 or 5 vehicles I've bought came with factory bi-xenons except my SuperDuty of course. I know to upgrade would require an actual reflector housing change and I finally found an option - I think.

Anybody have experience/opinion of these: http://www.neweggmall.com/Product/20...0/product.html

 

No experience. But opinion?
Any product that cheap means minimal attention has been spent on accurate optics and lots of attention spent on making them cheap. In other words, crap by design.

As others have mentioned, good light is ALL about the precision of the optics. Precision is not cheap.

Something I haven't seen mentioned here: DOT standards require low beam incandescent headlights to project something like 2% (I forget the exact amount... sorry) UPWARDS to illuminate street and highway signs. Yes, that is also shining into oncoming drivers eyes. Fortunately, 2% of a typical 45 or 55 watt halogen bulb doesn't blind them too much....

But 2% of an HID output IS seriously blinding, so HID headlights must project much less upwards.

So HID lights MUST be focused differently to be safe. A DOT legal factory HID reflector is one way. I love the Acura conversion! As you can see in the pictures, the top edge of the pool of light on the garage door is much, much sharper.

Using what is sometimes called a "European focus" reflector assembly (less than 0.5% or so focused upwards) is another approach to a safe HID conversion. I have some older Hella replacement headlights like this. You still need to get the element positioned exactly perfectly for proper focus, but at least the reflector is not dooming you to failure by design.

 

But is this truly a "cheap" design? The $300 original price is just for housings. In the details they mention you can upgrade to a HID setup. From what I read in other posts decent projector housings run about this price so I'm wondering if anybody has first hand experience with these given the number of users on this forum?