Yes, he stated they were...

however, just dont base it by the picture...u need output shots. A projector PROJECTS LIGHT, a halogen reflector REFLECTS LIGHT. Sure they may be a pretty color in the above photo, but the same was available in your stock housings with a PNP kit.

When u line up your truck...make sure you are level...a normal OEM HID projector output will look like this:



Step or slop cutoff...that is THE reason of getting projection headlamps, more light focused throughout the beam pattern, instead of the big blob you see with stock lighting.

if your Halogen projectors are anywhere even remotely close to the output line shown, you sould be fine with a PNP kit. You may have a little glare above cutoff line, but itll be ok. Keep in mind, this is concerning your output only and blinding others. Im making no reference to the actual look of your lights on at night. You can make them look however, but if you want better output as well, check your cutoff and go from there.

 

here ya go everyone!

 

wow not too bad. Yupp throw some HID's in there and call it a day. Output should be pretty good.

edit: Oh and dont forget to measure the distance from the stock bulb to the lens.
You can do this by shining a bright flashlightdirectly into the projector with the OEM bulb in the housing. Guesstimate how much room you have...ill check exact measurements of an HID bulb to our H13 later on today so itll give u an idea if you will be safe running Xenon bulbs

 

Thanks! You think I can just order like the $100 kit off ebay or something? One that comes with the bulbs already attatched to the ballasts for plug and play setting?

 

I would really like these housings too....but afraid of what true HID's will look in them since there really not designed for true HID's.....

Someone post up pics if they have this setup with HID's in them.....

 

True HID's (Philips D2S) run cooler than halogens. They run at a lower wattage and produce 2-3 times the amount of light. HID kits, however, have no quality control. Many of their bulbs run hotter than halogens. You may or may not damage your housings, but you get what you pay for.

I bet he probably means a halogen bulb with Xenon gas in it. Imitations that change the colour, slightly. They're still just halogens, though.

That's where I get all my information. GREAT site. No, it's not all Civics. There's a couple on there, but I'm working on my F150 thanks to that site.

HIDPlanet isn't just a good resource, it's a GREAT resource. A few people on there will laugh, but a lot of the time it's out of frustration. Reflectors and halogen projectors, do not handle HID's well. A reflector will cause bad glare that will blind oncoming vehicles. Halogen projectors are a better option, but don't take advantage of the power that HID's have. The beam pattern, on a halogen projector, is narrow because of the lack of intensity from a halogen bulb. The halogens must be focused on a narrow path to light up the path in front of the vehicle. With HID's, light output isn't a problem. Because of this, the projectors are designed to cast a very wide beam. I've posted this picture a couple of times, here, but here it is again:



That is the type of output that a real retrofit will provide. Don't expect that kind of output from the cheap $100-$200 headlights you get from eBay or other aftermarket providers. For reference, the little red lights are the tail lights of a Lincoln LS.

Another thing to consider is colour temperature. This is consistent and a lot of HID Kits do not properly advertise colour. DDM says 6000K is one colour while EuroDezigns says 6000K is another. It doesn't change! That is from lack of quality control and people just trying to confuse you with something you are probably not familiar with.

Colour is colour, just like an inch doesn't change from one company to another, neither does colour temperature. The higher the temperature, the less light it outputs. 4300K is what OEM bulbs use. BMW's, Mercedes, Acura, Lexus, etc, all use 4300K bulbs. A 4300K bulb puts out 3200 Lumens (compared to an H3 bulb which puts out some 1200 Lumens and an H9 bulb that puts out roughly 1900 Lumens). A 10,000K bulb puts out less light and a 25,000K bulb puts out no light (that we can see). You CANNOT upgrade and get more light from your headlights by going from a 6000K bulb to a 10,000K bulb!! It's the difference between lighting a building with a fluorescent bulb and a black light. Yeah, it puts out light, but which one is usable? A scale to describe the colour of light:



Yellow:
1500 k Candlelight
2700-2900 k Yellow painted fog halogen bulbs
-------------------------------
Yellowish white:
3200 k Sunrise/sunset
3200 k Premium H7 non painted halogen bulb
3400 k 1 hour from dusk/dawn
-------------------------------
White:
4100 k Philips/Osram OEM HID D2S
5500 k Bright sunny daylight around noon
----------------
Blueish white
5500-5600 k Electronic photo flash
6000 k Philips Ultinon HID D2S
6500-7500 k Overcast sky
-----------------
Blue:
9000-12000 k Blue sky
-----------------
Purple:
28000 Northern sky
12000-30000 k Ultra Violet light (black light)

Continued...

 

...Continued

The colour that you see when approaching a vehicle with HID's is not from the colour of the bulb. That colour is called prism effect and comes from the light passing through the lens of the projector. Same type effect as you would get if you passed a focused beam of light through a glass of water.

Something else to consider. Daniel Stearns Lighting Consultants wrote an article on fog lights that applies to your headlights too. A quote from there states:

What this means to HID's is that higher colour temperature bulbs are harder to focus on. A 10,000K bulb is harder to focus on, than a 4300K bulb. The eye is more sensitive to it, but cannot focus as well.

Lastly, if you're putting HID kits in a halogen projector, you are causing a lot of glare to oncoming vehicles. It seems that every idiot in a jacked up F150 or Ram, etc, has to have some 10,000K HID kits. It's annoying as hell to drive at one, on top of dangerous and illegal. They look silly, driving around in these trucks, which would look amazing if it weren't for their headlights. Why not leave it to the silly ricer crowd and their Civics?

[/end rant]

 

mtylerb:

great article, and I have a love/hate feeling towards your opinion on aftermarket HIDs in halogen systems. Around here, we have big jacked up trucks with a rear-end leveling system, thus making those trucks low-beams into high-beams and high-beams into aircraft spotting lights. a few of those have HIDs and as much as they are annoying, i hope that everyone in this forum has the courtesy and safety-conscience mind of to lower the aimpoint of the headlights as to not blind oncoming drivers. and how does HID kits make trucks look silly? it is a definate head-turner and i've recieved more compliments on my setup than any other mod I own. lastly, the ricers are not going to take the one good mod i love the most from me, even if that means sterotyping me in with them.

-alex

 

While I'll admit that everybody has a different idea of what looks cool. A lot of people go to HID kits thinking that they are going to get the same performance as what you'd get from a BMW or Mercedes HID headlights. They are fed lies from the HID kit manufacturers and believe it. There is so much ignorance when it comes to HID's, that nobody knows fact from fiction. People broadcast their opinions as fact with nothing to back it up.

If you want HID's for looks and not performance, then go for the HID kit. If you want it for performance and looks, then go for the retrofit. There are OEM bulbs, such as the Philips Ultinon bulb, that provide a bluer light and don't sacrifice a lot of quality. You can put those in a retrofit to stand out from the rest of people with real HID's.

I don't mean to bash people's views of what they view as "cool". I just want people to see through the lies that these kit companies put out. If I can convince anybody here to go with a retrofit, then I've done my good deed.

Just so we understand each other. I fell for the lies when I first started looking at HID's back in December. I paid some $200 for a kit from EuroDezigns. I got the kit and used it for a couple weeks, but wondered why there were so many hotspots in the beam pattern. I finally removed the kit after finding HIDPlanet and decided to go the full retrofit route.

I am now working on retrofitting a set of Acura TL HID projectors into a set of Hella blackout headlights. Money is tight, though, as I'm sure many of you are experiencing as well, so it is slow going. I am, in no way, trying to say that I'm better than anyone here. I am just trying to save someone the disappointment of spending their hard earned cash and not getting the results they expected - like I did.