HiDplanet : The Official Automotive Lighting Forum - The Buzz

If you really are serious about educating yourself on HID's check that website. and the SINGLE most important factor in quality of HID set up is Install. The Ballast should be securely mounted away from water and heat and the bulbs themselves should NEVER be touch without clean gloves on.

 

Mehhh I don't know but I can obviously tell my difference from my 8k HIDs than from low or even high beams, it makes the night look so natural like I can't really explain and it lights up so much from the signs to the things on the ground to like the surroundings even , its so much better since I have poor night vision as well and they were only 100 bucks installed

 

Do you get flashed from oncoming traffic a lot too?

 

i think the biggest factors involved with hod setup is quality of your housing and proper aiming

 

I do here and there , the HID is set up for my low beams and well I still have normal high beams so I hold it like half way so both my low and high beams are on just to piss them off

 

Ya, what the difference between your setup and mine is that "proper way to do things" aspect. The reason you see, or don't see/notice high quality retrofits is because they don't catch your eye, blinding you when you are just trying to make it to point B. Your headlights are yours, not someone elses to share, so do it right and do a retrofit or like I said, don't do it at all.

 

^ agreed.

There have only been a couple of headlights I have seen that looked good without the retro fit. but they were angled down to the ground, and the housing lenses were polished to get rid of the little reflect/refract lines in them which helped get rid of a lot of glare.

I was on i75 the other night and there were a few cars that had stock lights that were annoying.
Pretty much any newer acura car. Especially the TL It wasn't so much that they put of so much more light than everyone else, it was that the actual housings were so glaring. They could be half a mile back and have other cars around them and their lights would still glare in your mirrors. At first I thought it might have been one deuche that had their lights angled wrong, but then I was noticing just how many other cars were like that. I noticed it was mainly Acuras.
There was a brand new Maxima that was on the road that looked like his highbeams were on. If you peered through the glare enough, it looked like there were two separate lights on in each housing. Again, the light itself wasn't anything more than anyone else, it was the car itself that was so glaring. Could have just been an idiot that didn't know how to work the knobs in his new car. When you would get behind him and flash your high beams at him, he would click his lights off as if to show that they were just his normal lights. I doubt these cars annoyed on coming traffic all that much, expect maybe when they got close just before passing. It just made you squint really bad when they were in your mirrors.

These cars all came with HIDs and projectors from the factory and they were that annoying because of how much light reflected in the housings the projectors were in.
Sticking a HID in a reflector style housing is 50x worse.
You loose a good chunk of your light with it just being reflected a dozen wrong directions. You produce a stupid amount of glare. So even if they are angled down, the housings still glare really bad and blind other cars on the road. There just isn't anything good about sticking a HID in a normal housing.
Maybe if you were doing like 12000k or something like there were the color was the important part. At that point, the light output is low enough that they won't glare so bad.

 

Or, properly aim your housings. I bought a headlight adjustment tool when I installed mine, and parked my Camaro on the side of the road so when I was done aiming the lights against the garage door I would park in the street and hop into the Camaro to see if they were too bright. 1997/98 Lincoln MKVIIIs were available with factory HIDs, as were 2003-2005 Town Cars, and early 00's Lexus LS400/430s just to name a few. None of these cars had projector housings. Not as effective as projectors, but it is still possible.

Edit: Im still doing a retrofit in my spare headlights, but there are ways to having HIDs in incandescent housings without being a complete fucktard.

 

another really good site

Automotive Lighting FAQ

 

I'm cautious about not offending others. Partly because I am a gentleman and partly because
there are crazies around who enjoy blowing 44 Magnum holes in 99Civics "just to piss them off". -Bob

Empire,
We are presuming that you meant 1200 instead of 12,000???...