Just look at the pictures between the "cheap" way and the "proper" way.

 

Hey now, some classic cars had the high beam switch on the floor!

 

I have 6 kits running around Houston and none of them have been flashed by on coming traffic. The EURO has a glass housing vs stock and that may be a differance. The Vettes sit's pretty low and you can always adjust the aim of the lights. As far as the high beams go they HID's do turn off when you use the high beams.
I guess I could call my lights Cheap. Alot cheaper than 1000$ . I think this thread will end up There are alot if intelligent people on this forum who have very strong opinions and alot of knowledge which is why i love this place. I'm not trying sell a bad/cheap product just a cost effective way for better lighting.

 

the cutoff is very sharp with the ACA low beams as the pics in this thread already show. if additional light is needed above the cutoff, you can turn on your fog lamps or your high beams. i use my piaa 1100x lamps in conjunction with my ACA HID low beams and the light output is phenominal.

these two options would have helped the guy in the mountains who couldn't see.

 

Thanx
I'll pass the info along and also use it for mine. He only had the car for 1 day and wanted to drive it more than read the manual!!!!!!

 

that makes too much sense!

 

thus another problem with bulb swap kits.

buy turning off the HIDs everytime you use highbeams you shorten the life of the HID bulb considerably!
That's why the ACA projector headlights AND the C6 (and almost every other car with factory HIDs) don't turn off low beam HID's when highbeams are turned on.

so if the people using your kit use their highbeams often, or at least try to use them, they will be needing new HID bulbs alot sooner than you think!

do some reading on HID, you will learn alot...


and the difference between the euro housing and stock plastic housings are that the euro housing focuses the light much better than the US spec plastic housings, so it "tries" to control the extra light a little better than the plastic housings.
so the glare will be a little WORSE with US spec plastic housings.

 

T84/Euro's also use an H4 bulb with has the high/low contained in the same component - so can the Euro lenses even be used with aftermarket HID "bulbs only"? Or would you wind up losing your high beams?

 

We have a set of H4's that we are going to install on my old car that has the EURO's. Will keep ya posted

 

euro housings with the bulb swap HIDs, yes, you loose highbeams.

 

\


Out of curiosity are the EURO kits DOT approved/ legal in the US. Not trying to open a can of worms, i just dont know the answer.

 

no, they're not, but with the standard H4 halogen bulb in them they pass state inspection with no problems.
I did have a problem passing inspection with the 6000k H4 HID kit, without even testing the lights they said that they are not legal because they're "blue" tinted.

I went home, plugged in the standard H4 halogens and it went right through.

 

I have a cheap "plug-and-play" kit I bought from "that" auction site for less than $200 and couldn't be happier with it! No flashing from oncoming traffic or probs w/ LEOs. Plus I ended up with $1k extra for performance mods!!!

A nice beam cutoff is nice, but I'm MUCH happier with the AR long tubes that I had installed with the money I saved!!

 

the new ACA projector housings come with a DOT certificate to show for state inspection.

 

Man, let up on all your personal issues with swap kits. You can't possible back up with any evidence what you said about everytime we use highbeams we shorten the HID bulb life? The reason that yours and other systems have them stay on is because once there is any interuption in power they need to be re-started (per say) and that could take upto a second and then power to full intencity brightness in a few seconds. This kit I have is instant on even when I go from Low to High and back.

 

I realy dont mean to bitch about it even though I know thats how it comes across, I have looked into how much the actual OEM lenses cost and to get a set of ones from an acrua I recall it was like 200 for the housings and lenses with a cutoff, lots of people just swap them into the stock projectors of the 3000GT second gen for a better cutoff, thats what I want is a "cheep" cutoff, I am willing to spend a few hundread for projectors but not close to 1000, so your right I just wont buy it.

 

you're wrong!
I have no personal issues with bulb swap HID kits.
It's the truth!

Read up on HID!


here is "some" info on your "bulb swap" kit.
this is a cut and paste from Dainel stern Lighting
http://www.danielsternlighting.com/t...nversions.html



Thinking of converting to HID?

So you've read about HID headlamps and have it in mind to convert your car. A few mouse clicks on the web, and you've found a couple of outfits offering to sell you a "conversion" that will fit any car with a given type of halogen bulb. STOP! Put away that credit card.

An HID kit consists of HID ballasts and bulbs for "retrofitting" into a halogen headlamp. Often, these products are advertised using the name of a reputable lighting company ("Real Philips kit! Real Osram kit! Real Hella kit!") to try to give the potential buyer the illusion of legitimacy. Fact: While some of the components in these kits are sometimes manufactured by the companies mentioned, the components aren't being put to their designed or intended use. Reputable companies like Philips, Osram, Hella, etc. NEVER endorse this kind of "retrofit" usage of their products.

Halogen headlamps and HID headlamps require very different optics to produce a safe and effective—not to mention legal—beam pattern. How come? Because of the very different characteristics of the two kinds of light source.

A halogen bulb has a cylindrical light source: the glowing filament. The space immediately surrounding the cylinder of light is completely dark, and so the sharpest contrast between bright and dark is along the edges of the cylinder of light. The ends of the filament cylinder fade from bright to dark. An HID bulb, on the other hand, has a crescent-shaped light source -- the arc. It's crescent-shaped because as it passes through the space between the two electrodes, its heat causes it to try to rise. The space immediately surrounding the crescent of light glows in layers...the closer to the crescent of light, the brighter the glow. The ends of the arc crescent are the brightest points, and immediately beyond these points is completely dark, so the sharpest contrast between bright and dark is at the ends of the crescent of light.

This diagram shows the very different characteristics of the filament vs. the arc:





When designing the optics (lens and/or reflector) for a lamp, the characteristics of the light source are *the* driving factor around which everything else must be engineered. If you go and change the light source, you've done the equivalent of putting on somebody else's eyeglasses: You can probably make them fit on your face OK, but you won't see properly.

Now, what about those "retrofit" jobs in which the beam cutoff still appears sharp? Don't be fooled; it's an error to judge a beam pattern solely by its cutoff. In many lamps, especially the projector types, the cutoff will remain the same regardless of what light source is behind it. Halogen bulb, HID capsule, cigarette lighter, firefly, hold it up to the sun—whatever. That's because of the way a projector lamp works. The cutoff is simply the projected image of a piece of metal running side-to-side behind the lens. Where the optics come in is in distributing the light under the cutoff. And, as with all other automotive lamps (and, in fact, all optical instruments), the optics are calculated based not just on where the light source is within the lamp (focal length) but also the specific photometric characteristics of the light source...which parts of it are brighter, which parts of it are darker, where the boundaries of the light source are, whether the boundaries are sharp or fuzzy, the shape of the light source, and so forth.

As if the optical mismatch weren't reason enough to drop the idea of "retrofitting" an HID bulb where a halogen one belongs—and it is reason enough!—there are even more reasons why not to do it. Here are some of them:

The only available arc capsules have a longitudinal arc (arc path runs front to back) on the axis of the bulb, but many popular halogen headlamp bulbs, such as 9004, 9007, H3 and H12, use a filament that is transverse (side-to-side) and/or offset (not on the axis of the bulb) central axis of the headlamp reflector). In this case, it is impossible even to roughly approximate the position and orientation of the filament with a "retrofit" HID capsule. Just because your headlamp might use an axial-filament bulb, though, doesn't mean you've jumped the hurdles—the laws of optical physics don't bend even for the cleverest marketing department, nor for the catchiest HID "retrofit" kit box.

The latest gimmick is HID arc capsules set in an electromagnetic base so that they shift up and down or back and forth. These are being marketed as "dual beam" kits that claim to address the loss of high beam with fixed-base "retrofits" in place of dual-filament halogen bulbs. (A cheaper variant of this is one that uses a fixed HID bulb with a halogen bulb strapped or glued to the side of it...yikes!) What you wind up with is two poorly-formed beams, at best. The reason the original equipment market has not adopted the movable-capsule designs they've been playing with since the mid 1990s is because it is impossible to control the arc position accurately so it winds up in the same position each and every time.

In the original-equipment field, there are single-capsule dual-beam systems appearing ("BiXenon", etc.), but these all rely on a movable optical shield, or movable reflector—the arc capsule stays in one place. The Original Equipment engineers have a great deal of money and resources at their disposal, and if a movable capsule were a practical way to do the job, they'd do it. The "retrofit" kits certainly don't address this problem anywhere near satisfaction. And even if they did, remember: Whether a fixed or moving-capsule "retrofit" is contemplated, solving the arc-position problem and calling it good is like going to a hospital with two broken ribs, a sprained ankle and a crushed toe and having the nurse say "Well, you're free to go home now, we've put your ankle in a sling!" Focal length (arc/filament positioning) is only just ONE issue out of several.

The most dangerous part of the attempt to "retrofit" Xenon headlamps is that sometimes you get a deceptive and illusory "improvement" in the performance of the headlamp. The performance of the headlamp is perceived to be "better" because of the much higher level of foreground lighting (on the road immediately in front of the car). However, the beam patterns produced by this kind of "conversion" virtually always give less distance light, and often an alarming lack of light where there's meant to be a relative maximum in light intensity. The result is the illusion that you can see better than you actually can, and that's not safe.

It's tricky to judge headlamp beam performance without a lot of knowledge, a lot of training and a lot of special equipment, because subjective perceptions are very misleading. Having a lot of strong light in the foreground, that is on the road close to the car and out to the sides, is very comforting and reliably produces a strong impression of "good headlights". The problem is that not only is foreground lighting of decidedly secondary importance when travelling much above 30 mph, but having a very strong pool of light close to the car causes your pupils to close down, worsening your distance vision...all the while giving you this false sense of security. This is to say nothing of the massive amounts of glare to other road users and backdazzle to you, the driver, that results from these "retrofits".

HID headlamps also require careful weatherproofing and electrical shielding because of the high voltages involved. These unsafe "retrofits" make it physically possible to insert an HID bulb where a halogen bulb belongs, but this practice is illegal and dangerous, regardless of claims by these marketers that their systems are "beam pattern corrected" or the fraudulent use of established brand names to try to trick you into thinking the product is legitimate. In order to work correctly and safely, HID headlamps must be designed from the start as HID headlamps.

What about the law, what does it have to say on the matter? In virtually every first-world country, HID "retrofits" into halogen headlamps are illegal. They're illegal clear across Europe and in all of the many countries that use European ECE headlight regulations. They're illegal in the US and Canada. Some people dismiss this because North American regulations, in particular, are written in such a manner as to reject a great many genuinely good headlamps. Nevertheless, on the particular count of HID "retrofits" into halogen headlamps, the world's regulators and engineers agree: DON'T!

The only safe and legitimate HID retrofit is one that replaces the entire headlamp—that is lens, reflector, bulb...the WHOLE shemozzle—with optics designed for HID usage. In the aftermarket, it is possible to get clever with the growing number of available products, such as Hella's modular projectors available in HID or halogen, and fabricate your own brackets and bezels, or to modify an original-equipment halogen headlamp housing to contain optical "guts" designed for HID usage. But just putting an HID bulb where a halogen one belongs is bad news all around.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please note: From time to time, I am asked to comment on what are marketed as "new developments" in HID kits, and those asking sometimes point out to me that these "new developments" might render this article out-of-date, since the copyright date on the article is older than the date of these "new developments". Please understand, marketeers will always be coming up with dazzling new pseudoscience, tempting new hype and sneaky new ways of trying to convince you to buy their stuff. It's what they do. This article will never go out of date, because the problems with HID kits are conceptual problems, not problems of implementation. Therefore, they cannot be overcome by additional research and development, any more than someone could develop a way for you to put on somebody else's eyeglasses and see correctly.

________________________________________ ____________________________

give me some time and I'll find the part about the HID bulbs life being shortened by turning them off and on too much.

 

here's what I was looking for about turning the bulb off then on again (like flashing highbeams):








Please don’t turn your light off before the bulb has the opportunity to fully warm up to operating
temperature, or turn it on again before it has properly cooled down. Once activated, all HID
bulbs need a full 60 seconds to warm up to operating temperature. If you turn it off before this
(called “short striking”), you cause damage to the bulb. Similarly, you cause damage to the bulb if
you turn it on before it has cooled down (called “hot striking”). All HID bulbs are particularly
fragile during warm up and cool down, so take care not to jar the bulb during this period.

 

RPOZ4Z,
I completly know where your coming from. It is a marketing thing to get sales. I own a marketing company and also an import company, but really since they started the "investigation" five years ago there hasn't been any thing new pop up in legislation and the distribution of these kits are knowingly everywhere. Customs could stop the import of these quite easily pending their own investigation. But in reality this is a grain of sand compared to the the big problems our government has to handle.

 

it's not illegal to buy them, or sell them, it's just not legal to use them on a street driven vehicle.

aside from all that, do you understand WHY they are not good to use?
they are not good to use on the street for safety reasons, yours and other peoples safety.

I had them in my car for almost a year, after I got used to them I started to realize that I still wasn't seeing far enough down the road. Then I started reading about HID lights and found out why I couldn't see as much as I wanted with those HID kits.
lots of interesting reading there!