hid lights

cfrese

New Member
May 19, 2011
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texas
if anyone has hid lights which ones should i get? i read a few reviews and i want blue lights but 10000k is blue but not as bright as 5000k. but 5000k is not blue they are more white. so which ones should i get that are blue and bright cause i have slightly tinted headlights as well? all reagrds, Chris
 
the 6000s are brite and have a blue tint. oh and possibly be prepared for a ticket and fines. the law enforcement agencys are getting really pickey and starting to pick on the ones like you and I who modify our rides. i have the super brite sylvania bulbs and smoked headlites and still got pulled caues they "were" too brite.
 
An eBay "chip", electric superchargers and now HIDs? I suspect these threads should really go in Talk rather than Tech...

To answer the question, you really shouldn't go with HIDs in the factory housings at all. Reflector housings do not have the pattern control that, say, projector housings have and you end up blinding drivers in on-coming cars. This is the reason you never see HIDs offered from the factory in reflector housings. Here's how a decent projector cuts off the beam:

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versus the scatter and crappy cutoff of reflector housings:

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Re the bulb temperature: Headlights are supposed to illuminate the road, not be a fashion statement. If you go above 6000K you're just puking ricey, blue light.

Go 4300K, 5000K or, at most, 6000K in a decent projector housing or don't do HIDs at all.
 
Bought a truck with 8k's in it once... wow.

Go with 6k or less, and honestly even 5k would be your better option. The blue may be "in" to some people but from experience for the 24 hours I left the 8k's in, they are TERRIBLE in wet weather. Aside from that, they are just plain gawky.:nono:
 
Listen to Trinity GT. He knows what he's talking about. HID headlamps should not be thought of as a "fashion statement", and in fact, higher color temperature bulbs do a relatively poorer job of lighting the road. The higher the color temperature of the bulb, the less light will be emitted, and the "bluer" (or even "purpler" at high temperatures) the light will be. Blue light may look cool to some (I think it looks ricey), but it is a dangerous color to use for road illumination because human eyes do a relatively poor job of resolving images composed of blue light. For this reason, OEM HID headlamps use 4300K bulbs to minimize the amount of blue light emitted.
 
Oems use 4300k because that is the range of natural sunlight...what the eye is adapted to viewing. Higher k values are not "brighter"

In fact, 3000k and 12000k can have the same lumens, but the eye will see better closer to 3000k than it will at 12000k

Stick with 6000 tops. 5000 is a pretty good value to use. Above 6000 and things get too blue.

I drove a car with 10k blue hids in the rain....thought I was going to crap my pamts. I couldn't see junk....except the fact that my lights were flashng off the trees 15 feet above the road. But the owner kept insisting "these don't glare"

IMHO, the 99-04 headlight is one of the worst on the road for retrofitting HiDs. Every v6 I see with a kit glares badly.
 
I have 4300K's in my WRX and I can see great without blinding oncoming traffic (they are in retrofitted projectors also). There are lots of douches in my area with the blue lights and it is one of the most irritating things to have to deal with when driving at night.