JasonC SBB

Yes that is correct (Euro pattern of FX35).

I wish the $120 projectors Rotor used had 'em.

******* DOT, I dunno why they updated their crap ancient 100 year old spec, with a new spec that isn't as good as the Euro pattern, instead of just adopting it.

Doppelgänger

iTrader: (12)

So some searching, I'm sure you can find some projectors that have such a pattern.

JasonC SBB

I parked my miata and my beater (Acuronda with crappy halogens) one in front of the other so that an approaching car would see both cars' left headlight. Both were on low beam. Here are 2 pix, from different distances, taken at a height of an approaching sedan driver's eye. Take note that the camera's location from the cars is downhill, so the setup is worse than if the road is flat.

Here is the pic. The left bright spot is the Acuronda, the right bright spot is the miata:

and


Subjectively the miata's lights look brighter, but the street light is brighter!
I would call it "hmm, a bit glarey but not too bad". Nowhere near as bad as some I've seen, and far, far from mis-aimed halogens or hi beams.

Here's hi beam:



Now I was curious where the scatter comes from, so I took a closeup pic of the headlight, from an angle slightly above the cutoff point and from the direction of an approaching car:



Now I compared it to the wife's Focus with halogens, which has much better lights than the Acuronda:


So as you can see, the scatter is due to the design of the reflector. It's those steps in the reflectors. I don't think it's so much due to the difference in the light source (filament is long and skinny, HID has a round globe about the length of the halogen filament). The halogen bulb produces about the same % of scatter vs. the hotspot.

My conclusion is, "good enough". Though Rotor's conversion would be good bang for the buck.

JasonC SBB

Here is a comparison against stock Focus headlights

miata


Focus

Milky

iTrader: (1)

i also snapped a shot of my HID's in my E-Code's. yes, the optimum setup would be projectors. but this was cheap and improved the illumination of the road ten fold over stock. this is good enough till i justify spending the money for a low profile projector setup.

Doppelgänger

iTrader: (12)

H4 halogen


H4 HID


All I can say is that I've seen multiple 99/00 headlights with HIDs and they were all wrong. With that, I'll stop posting in here and let the thread go to it's original purpose.

shlammed

iTrader: (8)

So for us with an NA chassis what is the PROPER way to do it?
i read e-codes are good... like the above post with them.... but they dont look that great.


im looking for light output like i would have in my 08 GTI

RotorNutFD3S

iTrader: (33)

On my NA I was using HIDs in the Moss Motors low profile setup which have Hella projector assemblies. Very nice kit and great lighting, however, most people don't want to spend $500 on headlight assemblies. Neither did I, I traded someone my stock headlights and $100 for them. There's definitely a market for some less expensive projector solutions for the NA crowd.

Milky

iTrader: (1)

for the NA chassis, the best i could suggest would be a low profile popup kit using a Hella projector made for HID's.

the pic i took was about 1-2 car away from the brick wall. i keep my lights aimed lower than most, but i still light up the road very well. usually the highest point of my cutoff, sans the up swept part on the right side, is below almost every vehicles trim line i have encountered.

Doppel, it probably does not make too much of a difference, but my H4 HID bulbs have built in glare shields. its still not going to be anywhere as great as a projector, but from what i have seen, they will help cut down a lot of glare to oncoming drivers.

JasonC SBB

Doppelganger,

the comparison of the HID and halogen bulbs shows exactly my point. The light source in the HID bulb is the little sphere in the middle whose diameter is close to the length of the halogen filament. The Bixenons use a solenoid to move the sphere between the locations of the 2 H4 filaments you show, and in low beam mode, have effectively the same shielding as the H4 low beam filament (the upper one in your pic). I stand by my assertion that the sizes of the light sources aren't hugely different, like you suggested in your earlier post, a "1 inch long lightning bolt".

It's possible that the shielding and location of some HID bulbs are far worse than mine (VVME).

Again having said that, I do have the hots for the projector setup Rotor did. Great value for money for better low beam light output and less glare.

shlammed

iTrader: (8)

Not a fan of low pro setups. anything avaliable that fits stock location?

Doppelgänger

iTrader: (12)

Perhaps so. I just don't belive that any HID should be put into a reflector as they are designed to put a specific light output on the road and a specific output above the cutoff line using a specific bulb...change that even 1mm and everything goes askew. Being in your position, I'd invest in some projector driving/fog lights and add HIDs and put some higher wattage H4 bulbs in...have your cake and eat it too! At least you're not using some ricer colored **** . If I were in this position, I'd try these...

http://store.candlepower.com/64205.html

http://store.candlepower.com/90h4hbxtpo.html

It really sucks no one makes a HIR H4 bulb since that would be the solution for you guys with 99/00 or NAs running the Hella E-codes.

I will apologize for coming across as a dick, but I really want to stress the importance of safe and proper vehicle lighting.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

There have already been a couple of good responses to this, so I'll simply concur. Observing that the HID assembly is about an inch long is no different from observing that the glass envelope around a halogen lamp is about the same length.

From Doppelgänger's later post, you can see that the actual light-producing element in a HID lamp is a tiny oval-shaped capsule located about midway down the shaft. It's a small ball of ionized gas, not an inch-long lightning bolt. I've highlighted it here:



That's where the light lives. And to me, it does look to be about the same size as the resistive filament in a conventional halogen lamp. Now, from a practical standpoint there are obviously some differences, and I don't know enough about photonics and optics to make much more than a very slightly educated guess. I suspect that while the size of the element is similar, the position of the element may likely be different, especially since a halogen lamp typically contains two elements, offset from one another slightly. I don't have two to compare side-by-side, but I'd guess that the position of the HID capsule in this application is probably a compromise between the typical positions of the hi and lo filaments in a conventional H4.


A typical H4 halogen lamp also contains a design element which would be nearly impossible to replicate in a HID capsule. Here's a slightly clearer picture of an H4 than the one Doppel posted:



See how there's a tiny little reflector inside the envelope, placed so near to the upper (lo-beam) filament that it's practically touching it? You're not going to be able to replicate that with an HID no matter what you do.


So, yeah. I pretty much concur. Reflectors and halogen H4 lamps were designed to work together. HID-specific projectors and HID lamps were designed to work together.






How the hell did I miss that thread?

That is the link I'd been looking for. A place to buy actual, shuttered bi-xenon projector assemblies for less than $546.15 each.




I feel you here, as the little kicker on the end is one thing I like about my Hellas.

I wonder if you could approximate this effect with DOT projectors by rotating one of the two assemblies slightly counter-clockwise (as viewed from the driver's position)?

Doppelgänger

iTrader: (12)

Yeah yeah..I meant to say 1cm..not 1in. But it's still a completely different light output/requency. Doing an image search for H4 HID bulbs reveals all kinds of "trickery" to emulate/shield/divert light..but it's still not the design of the H4 halogen bulb and will never put light in the same pattern. I wouldn't mind if it did and would be all about people seeing the road with better light.

JasonC SBB

1 mm error in the shape isn't much at all. Before the days of HIDs I experimented with wiggling the halogen bulb's seating and observed the effect on the pattern on a wall. I stand by my assertion that the scatter is not mainly due to the differences between the shapes of the light sources, but is inherent in the reflector design. See my reflector closeup pix above.

Joe, that little "reflector" in the bulb isn't a reflector, it's a shade. Its exact shape varies from brand to brand. (I just looked at some of my H4 halogens of various brands) The HID capsule I bought has a complicated looking shade whose purpose is to cast a shadow of the same shape as the halogen.

In the end I looked at the glare of my own car and to me it's "acceptable". But again yes, I'm interested at some point in upgrading to 50W HIDs and projectors. (having and eating cake)

Joe, the shape of the E-code/DOT low beam output is a function of the shade inside Rotor's projectors. It can be modified. See what I posted in his thread.

Doppelgänger

iTrader: (12)

Maybe not side to side, but fore/aft position changes the angles in which the light hits the reflector (focus). I wish I knew or could find more information about the light frequency of a halogen initiated light and a HID initiated light and the differences between UV and IR outputs associated with each....like the differences between looking at a very bight l.e.d. and a welding arc. I'm sure one is more harsh on the human eye over the other and would like to find proof/exactly why. I mean, I know when I've come around a corner and faced someoned HID/bi-xenon on "high" vs a normal halogen light on "high" and it's a noticable difference as the HID light seems to 'twinkle' and burn much more than a halogen. Yes, I know light color has a lot to do with that (which is why I hate everyone who runs blueish/blue/purple or whatever other color they think looks cool).

I'm still surprised how many different "designs" there are for attempting to chield a H4 HID like a H4 halogen. I don't doubt that a lot of the variations are imcompatable with various reflector designs.

JasonC SBB

But the location of the capsule fore/aft is a function of the accuracy of the location of the light source wrt the base, not a function of the shape of the light source. The fore-aft length of the HID light source is about the same size as a halogen filament, but fatter in the middle (side-to-side).

The scatter with the halogen reflectors with the use of halogens appears to be designed into them, perhaps to have a little bit of light in directions other than down to the road. They are there with halogens, they are there with HIDs. Projectors appear to have much more aggressive shading. Perhaps true for both halogen and HID projectors.

One thing appears true about projectors, by design, they capture and reflect a larger "included solid angle" of the light source's output for a given total size, thus put out more light for a given light source. This is why my friend's 2003 P5 factory halogen projectors have far better low beams than my miata with halogens.

Doppelgänger

iTrader: (12)

About the same or exactly the same? Not that I'm asking you to know, but it's a big "?" that is a large determing factor to this entire discussion If we wanted to get super technical on that, we'd have to know if every H4 halogen bulb has the exact same placement and size of the filament and if every HID bulb has the same exact placement of the arc. But I don't expect to go that far, really.

Generally, HIDs change the light pattern when plugged into a reflector housing. Here is a fun example...an airplane. This is great because the light housings are not left or right biased light headlights, which can throw off the 'ole HID in one side and halogen in the other side comparison picture. Here you can see that two identical lights throw off a different pattern just by going from a 55w halogen to a 35w HID. Now, clearly the source of the light is positioned differently in order to move the light pattern that much. I'm not saying this is exactly what your headlights are doing as I've already admitted that one can probably use 5 different HID bulbs and get 5 different patterns in the same reflector and that there are different reflectors out there.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

1cm is even liberal. That capsule is maybe 3-4mm at best. They really are shockingly tiny for the amount of light that they produce.

But I don't buy the argument of "different light output/frequency." Visible light is visible light, and unless somebody changed general relativity or the Wien-Plank distribution law while I wasn't looking, it all propagates the same way. The differences here are mechanical in nature, full-stop.



Ok, poor word choice on my part. But the fact is that it's a design feature which an HID element can only approximate at best.

(slaps self on forehead.)

Yeah, I expect that would in fact work rather nicely.

You're costing me money, you know that, right?




I'm not entirely certain that I'm following you here (the location of something isn't a function of its output, the output is a function of the location) but I still maintain that there are two basic mechanical differences at play.

One is the aforementioned shade / reflector thingy inside the H4 envelope which cannot be precisely reproduced in an HID design.

The other is that the position of the light source in an HID element is, at best, a compromise between the positions of the two light sources in a dual-beam H4. Yes, I am aware that there are "H4 replacement" HID elements which feature a solenoid-operated sleeve that moves around the light source, but the fact remains that the position of the light source itself is going to be different. And it is the relationship between the position of the light source and the reflector behind it does play a role in determining the shape and spread of the beam.

For a simple illustration of this, go grab a Maglite-brand flashlight (torch, for our UK readers), or one of the more faithful copies. Not an LED version, the old-school one with the incandescant lamp.

As you twist the top of the flashlight, the beam changes from a broad, spread-out pattern to a tightly focused one. The way this is accomplished is that the action of twisting the top causes the reflector assembly to move forward and backward relative to the lamp, which is entirely equivalent to moving the lamp forward and backward relative to the reflector. You're not changing the shape of the reflector, merely the relationship between the position of it and the lamp.

Doppelgänger

iTrader: (12)

As I said, I'd like to know if there is or isn't a different in the type of light based on the light source. I can't say I did all that well in science back in highschool. I'm sure you read that and said to yourself "what an idiot". But hey, I'm open to the absorption of knowledge. Ok seriously though, I feel at this point I'm being a pain in the *** to you guys and will STFU.