Originally Posted By: Roob
For HID it comes down to quality of products. The majority of tuner HID's I see are nothing short of horrific.
As far as seeing things with my setup, halogen and then upgraded bulbs didn't even hold a candle to what these lights illuminate. I went with a high quality bulb from Osram at 4200k that has a yellow tinge to it. No blue at all. You'll only get that with 6000k plus bulbs then purple. Those bulbs are useless in inclement weather, but then they look nice and that's why people buy them. I included a performance tuned for distance projector and then a high quality ballast. Combine that with correct alignment and aiming and you have lighting Valhalla!!! All 8800-9000 lumens with an upgraded ballast and that's on low beam. Don't get me started on high beam because that number goes much higher without the halogen high beams.
HID's are much more than "ok" for seeing at night and I don't know what systems you've seen but the quality is out there. I have no issues with colour rendering or monochrome you speak of.
As far as your high beams and driving lights outshining HID'S I find it pretty funny that you'd need to do all of that just to overcome the low beam of an HID setup at factory 35 watts. I'm glad you are happy with the low beam throw of your halogen, but they don't equate to the low beam throw of HID's. It's comparing OEM 6400 focused/projected lumens from HID to 1600-3900 reflected lumens in a halogen.
Well it's each to their own I guess, and it varies by application. Go on and get HID's for the jeep, you know you want too!!
Cheers.
I'm actually running TRS hi/lo projectors in both the mains and the fogs. I spent a bit of time fine-tuning the shutters on an equal-height test bench (including standing in the road with it, at night, getting the lower cutoff right) and run them in the tundra. They are nicely made and I haven't had problems with the throw but find the color spectrum of halogen more natural with lass fatigue. I still like my setup as it solved problems with the original lamps, but am also saying that no solution, including the lofty HID, is perfect. In terms of color rendering, it is not a mystery that HIDs lack an even distribution.
One area rarely discussed with HIDs is the amount of lumen /loss/ introduced by the projector mechanism itself. Nobody pays attention to this... The hotspot of any lamp beam needs to be concentrated immediately at or below the upper cutoff to minimize foreground glare/dazzle while proving best distance reach... very difficult as you need exponentially more light thrown as you move away from the source to get the reach and the idea of "even" illumination. In a reflector housing, it's a matter of biasing the angles to put the hotspot on the horizon. with an axial filament, they can harvest the vast majority of light output from the bulb. some of it... ~10% (WAG) gets lost in the glare shield, but that's also in-line, not perpendicular, to the filament, where all the light is radiated. In other words, efficient.
In a projector, you NEED the extra lumens because some get wasted. In every pic I've seen, as well as the TRS projectors, the hotspot is 1/2 to 2/3 covered by the upper cutoff. This gets those same results---- get it hot right under the horizon for best distance, least foreground dazzle, and safety for oncoming traffic. However, plenty of lumens are lost in the shutters, and it's a necessary evil included in trying to capture and control the spherical, and not tiny, light source within the HID capsule. Some designs are more efficient than others, and I suspect the high-dollar oem fixtures, single beam (no hi/lo) will be most optimal. However, there is still more loss in a projector my the very nature that you have to shutter them internally.
food for thought.
