Things to know when upgrading to HID

**NighthawkGT** · January 16th, 2010 02:26 PM

Upgrading to HID requires some things to be considered, its not just placing the hid bulb inside your headlights and expect everything to work fine.

HID and HALOGEN are two different technology, they differ in the way they emit lights.

Optic engineers designs the headlight of a particular car with the light source as the primary basis. if they are designing for HALOGEN headlights, they use a HALOGEN bulb as the pattern. Same goes for HID, in designing HID headlights, they use HID bulb as their pattern and reference.

Now when you place a HID bulb inside your HALOGEN designed housing, that's when things go wrong.. terribly wrong.. Your cut off will vanish, lights are just scattered everywhere without direction, practically useless, and will not pass any safety regulations, you become a hazard to the road, you spent something that is practically useless as far as USABLE LIGHT is concerned.

by standard, any automotive headlamp light projection should have a beam pattern.. these is what we call CUT OFF, its the vertical lines you see on halogen light projections

just like this picture below.

** notice the step pattern, the step is towards the right side because we are driving in a left hand drive country. This step pattern gives additional light towards the passenger side which is NOT directed towards the opposing traffic and thus deemed FUNCTIONAL USABLE LIGHT.

now by upgrading to HID without doing anything to your headlamps which accepts HALOGEN originally.
what you get is GLARE.

these is what blinds other motorist on opposing traffic, much like driving with your high beams always on, now that's just not polite. Have you ever flashed somebody cause their lights is on high beam? or better yet have YOU been flashed at because you forgot to switch your lights back to low beam? kinda embarrassing isn't it?

now we have established that its a NO NO to put plug and play HIDs to our HALOGEN headlamps..

but we are insistent....

we want to have HID too like they have in luxury cars...

we want to have brighter lights at light....

we want to have that cool BLUE effect on our lights...

but all we know is to plug 8000k colored China HIDS in our headlamps..

but there is a solution.. and it is called HID RETROFITTING..

HID RETROFITTING can be done by two ways, retrofit a reflector that is designed for HID (commonly uses D2R base bulbs) or retrofit a projector that is designed for HID (commonly uses D2S base bulbs).
The latter mentioned is the most common way.

by retrofitting a HID Projector in your existing headlamp housing, what you get is a razor sharp cut off, even light spread, better light efficiency, intense beam output, wider beam coverage, and of course a CUT OFF line.
some aspects may vary base on design of the HID projectors.

driving a car with retrofitted hid projectors compared to plug and play is like NIGHT and DAY. you can clearly see that nice cut off line when your driving.. unlike when driving with a plug and play HID, light is scattered all around, imagine, all the UNUSED light everywhere, but when in a projector, all the light is concentrated where it should be... BELOW the cut off line.

Now lets talk about bulb colors.

We know that when we hear HID here and there, we think that the color should be white , blue or even violet!

We can thank our friends in CHINA for manufacturing such bulb colors for automotive use..

OEM HIDs uses a color temperature of 3900k - 4300k which is expressed as yellowish white in our terms here.

OK now some may wonder... why are some AUDI's, BENZ, BMW's, LEXUS, CAMRY's, 300C, have a blue colored lights when they were passed by that car??

if OEM color is yellowish white, why are they colored blue from afar?

Now here is the answer that you have been awaiting for a long time ago.. the answer is DIFFRACTION of light.

HID projectors have a cut off shield, this is a metal plate that is placed strategically in between the Ellipsoidal Reflector and the Plano-Convex Lens. Light passes thru the shield and is diffracted because of the sharp edge, these breaks light into many colors. these is what we call as the COLOR BAND.

notice in the picture below

that color band is what you see from afar, its called COLOR FLICKER.

a car with a color band like that will have COLOR FLICKER's when viewed from afar, colors would range from blue, violet, cyan, magenta, orange. now that is nice!!

now lets get back to our AFTERMARKET MANUFACTURERS..

they want to replicate that color flicker as seen from the high end cars with hid projectors so they produce a blue color bulb. (color temps 6000k up to 12000k) LOL! :lol:

okay, they replicated it already, admittedly..... a car equiped with a 6000k or 8000k looks COOL!

very unique from the rest of the pack.

now heres some concrete hard facts for you..

lets compare bulb ratings

color range Lumens (which is the amount of light intensity)
=================================================
Halogen 900 lm ~ 1600 lm
4300k 3200 lm
6000k 2400 lm
8000k 1700 lm or lower
10000k forget it! stick to your halogens

Light intensity is always INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL to Color temperature

in simple terms

the higher the color temp the lower the intensity.

the more blue your bulb is the less light it emits.

Now lets talk about COLOR SHIFTING.

hid bulbs COLOR shifts as it get old.

color shifting means that the color will change after the bulb is used for about 200 hours or so.

so a 4300k color bulb will color shift to 5500k or so when its used.

same goes for a 6000k, it will shift to about 8000k or so when its old.

so the same rule still stands.. when the bulb color shifts, it losses light intensity.

**NighthawkGT** · January 16th, 2010 02:37 PM

Examples of retrofitted headlights

pajero fieldmaster

corolla ae111

honda jazz

honda civic

ford lynx

**NighthawkGT** · January 16th, 2010 02:41 PM

honda civic

corolla altis

**NighthawkGT** · January 16th, 2010 02:44 PM

nice clean cut offs!

low beam

high beam

Heres the real HID output!

very wide output pattern! using only a single bulb! thats true lighting efficiency. just count the number of parking lot lanes it covers!

**beni23** · January 17th, 2010 11:01 AM

well explained there sir.

thanks for the infos!

**surg** · January 18th, 2010 10:59 PM

very very informative sir!
noob question lang po: kelangan pa po ba hid retrofitting sa montero? if yes, how?

**NighthawkGT** · January 20th, 2010 10:35 AM

Originally Posted by surg

very very informative sir!
noob question lang po: kelangan pa po ba hid retrofitting sa montero? if yes, how?

montero sport headlights have a halogen projector in there already. output is not so bad as the cut off's still there. the output beam pattern is not as wide as xenon projectors though.