6000k HID's

Judging from the video, that's a lot of glare... Post a cutoff pic.

 

Look nice. I am ordering the HID kits but not sure 5000k or 6000k.
BTW, is white turn signals legal in your state? I know it is NOT in Maryland.
Thanks

 

I think I am going to get the 5000k. Where did you buy the kits from and how much.
Thanks

 

One more thing, people sell kits on Ebay like this one.
hid kit xenon conversion H1 H3 H4 H7 H11 9006 9005 9007: eBay Motors (item 260614502099 end time Jun-05-10 10:42:04 PDT)
Is it a good product?
Thanks

 

Thank you for the info.

 

This is absolutely 100% false, except turn signals which are federally allowed to be yellow or white (nothing else) but provincially and statewide various places have put in yellow-only laws. So check your state.

eBay bulb colours are not accurate at all. One sellers 5000k is another sellers 8000k is another sellers bagillionK. All, and I mean every single car, with HID projectors or reflectors sold in the United States use 4300K bulbs. It is the one and only legal temperature allowed. This is bright white light with a yellow-ish tinge to it. After about 100 hours or so of use, the bulb colour shifts to a higher temperature around 5000k, which is bright white with a bluish tint to it. Sort of the difference between the cheap CFL bulbs (5000k) and the more expensive "daylight" CFL bulbs (4300k). Note that this is not true of the Phillips 85122+ which does not colour shift and stays 4300K or the 85122CM/85122CX which both start and stay around 5000k. The former is great if you dont like the white/blue and the latter is great if you have one bulb that has already colour shifted, the other burns out, and you can buy a replacement that will match the output instead of look weird.

There are other bulbs made for other non North American markets that are illegal in the US and Canada. But if your car came with HIDs, it came with 4300K bulbs.

The reason why foreign cars look more blue in the cutoff than domestic cars is all in the optics of the projectors. Basically, the way light reflects of the bowl of the projector and then is split by the shield and other notches inside the bowl as well as reflections through the lens determines the width, brightness, even-ness, and colour-temperature of the entire output. By changing the lens' distance from the bowl, or even the curvature of the lense, or by changing the distance/shape/curvature of the cutoff shield you can manipulate the 4300K light to split apart sooner or later, and which colours or more prominent.

Lexus uses really really really good projectors manufactured by Koito. Their design makes them appear blue in a distance, but the output is still 4300k. Same is true of the Acura TL projectors and the Honda S2000 projectors. This is unlike pretty much every single domestic car which use probably the worst projectors on the market, Hellas. These have horrible optic outputs, giving the light weird hotspots and no or minimal blue cutoffs. Same bulb, different projector, waaaay different output.

 

I am not saying you can't buy them, you shouldnt. Less light output and they are illegal.

 

Listen to 2k1Toaster. This man speaks the truth. I haven't ran into many people who knew about shifting colors and projector designs in a while, people just seem to care about color these days.

 

Thankyou very much. I am very into retrofitting using quality projectors, bulbs, and ballasts. Also working on some fancy electronics I am almost done with for a headlight control project.

FYI for next time, lower the light, better you can see. You would be able to see farther with a 4300K bulb or a 3000K bulb (reaaally yellow although just as illegal unless in fogs).

For that matter, if you retrofit some LS430 projectors into your car you would be able to see 4 or 5 lanes in either direction of the car for width, and a long way down the road all while getting rid of your glare and stepping it up a notch.

 

I can see that you're very into retro-fitting. The things you said are things that I used to read on BMW/Acura/Honda forums back in the day when everyone was into retro-fitting s2k and other projectors or modifying OEM projectors and what not. Good to have people like you on PC. Truly an asset to this forum.

 

I went through the same thing, I changed the ballasts and now I'm fine, I bought the slim ballest from ddmtuning

 

There are lots of reasons this can happen, the main ones are EMI and RFI.

Both are usually caused from cheaply made ballasts. Ballasts need to ramp the voltage up to multi-hundred volts worth. To do this, basically it charges up a cap/inductor combo, then lets it discharge, which because of the sign flip multiplies the voltage. Probably two or three stage to get the power right. But this means the ballast is drawing TONS of power for a nanosecond (or less), then no power, then TONS, then none, then TONS, and so on.

This basically starts oscillating the power cable. This can screw up everything else in the car. To cancel out the interference, you just put more filtering components in.

So either the ballast manufacturer does it, or you do it outside of the ballast. Obviously it is easier but more expensive for the manufacturer to do it. Think of the olive in an airplane thing. It may only be $1USD worth of components in bulk, but spread that out over multimillion quantities of units, and you save where you can. Those cheap ballasts from the same factory in china that are sold in lots of names all over ebay generally do not include this circuitry. The more expensive OEM ballasts or German made ballasts (generally) do have this circuitry. You can pay $100 for just ballasts. I highly reccommend the OEM Toyota/Lexus ballsts which are Denso. They look like this: http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/83/densod2sballast2.jpg

Also if it gets to the point where you are drawing too much current the wire will heat up and the voltage will drop considerably into the brown out voltage area which means instability for everything. But this also creates a lot of EMI in itself. You always hear people saying dont power HIDs off of halogen power wires. There is a reason for this. A halogen lamp will draw less than an amp all of the time. So the wires are meant to handle that load, around 12W-15W. A HID bulb can take 80A to start exciting the bulb salts, which is close to 1100W, then it evens out to a much lower number around 40W or so. Still more than stock wiring is meant to power. So if you are using the stock wiring, it is a big no-no. Use relay off the stock cable to power them off a beefier cable from the battery. In a Prius this is difficult, but it is the correct way to do it.

Now the same forces at work here that oscillate the wire, also make oscillating magnetic interference (i.e. radio/wireless). This will start around the main inductors and radiate outwards. It gets exponentially less powerful the father away from the ballast you are, but today's radios are meant to pick up very small signals. So the antenna on the roof may be picking it up instead of the actual frequency you want.


To fix it:

a) change the ballast to a better quality.
b) add filtering components to the ballasts
c) shield the ballasts to reduce radiation of RFI
d) ground the ballasts through a different point to reduce ground loops


Also, if your ballasts are this cheaply made, your bulbs are too. Like I have been saying cheap bulbs use inferior salt at a minimum. Generally there focal points are off because of bad base soldering as well, but the salts are the main issue. They run hotter and for less time than OEM bulbs. You can expect the chrome of your reflectors to burn up and flake away with continual use of these bulbs (as a generality, you make get lucky. So... do ya feel lucky?)

 

So do you make the generic "DDM" style ballasts? What sort of shielding and filtering are you putting on them?

 

no I did not make them, I got Phillips kit bulbs and ddm ballasts, ddmtuning sells the whole Chinese kit cheap, luckily there ballast doesn't interfere with the radio

HID Kits, BMW Aftermarket Bumpers & Lighting, DEPO - DDM Tuning