HID conversion Kit
Don't mean to hijack your thread but my questions are topical
Top of the line units are honestly MTEC, but those cost a grip. We're a direct distributor of Morimoto units which are also fairly high end and well engineered units at a reasonable price ($150).
One side intermittently will not ignite. On cold starts, I have to make sure the lights are set to "off", not auto, just for the car to start.
I have inexpensive (less than $50) VVME kits on my Lexus and Sonata, both equipped with retrofitted projectors, and they have been running for 5+ years flawlessly. I only opted for the pricier Morimoto kit because I thought it would work well with the W204's more intricate electronics but I was completely wrong. It's very frustrating. I'm ready to pull them out and return to halogens. Is there any hope for a fix?
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Who did you buy it from? I have not heard anything about a redesign on the Morimoto ballasts. They just recently had a tech refresh few months ago with new software, but I'll hit up Morimoto to see if there's anything new.
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One side intermittently will not ignite. On cold starts, I have to make sure the lights are set to "off", not auto, just for the car to start.
I have inexpensive (less than $50) VVME kits on my Lexus and Sonata, both equipped with retrofitted projectors, and they have been running for 5+ years flawlessly. I only opted for the pricier Morimoto kit because I thought it would work well with the W204's more intricate electronics but I was completely wrong. It's very frustrating. I'm ready to pull them out and return to halogens. Is there any hope for a fix?
Straight from TRS.com
It's great to hear that they are sending you new ballasts. Keep us posted on how they work!
HID kits are typically bad to put in headlight housings made for halogen bulbs, because typically speaking halogen housings use a reflector, not a projector to disperse the light beam. HID's are far brighter than halogen bulbs, so when you put an HID bulb in a reflector housing, the light pattern disperses everywhere and "splashes" all over the place, blinding other drivers with a horrific glare. From my understanding, HID's run cooler than halogen bulbs, so I don't see where the "melting plastic and wires shorting" issues came from, but thats a moot point.
Our headlights have a halogen projector for the low beam, which is the same basic design as a xenon projector. It's basically a reflective concave housing which the bulb sits inside, a glass lens which projects the light forward, and a cutoff shield which prevents the light from shining above a certain point. The cutoff shield is the biggest and most important difference in reflector housings and projector housings. Without the cutoff shield, the projector would emit a hellaciously blinding light all over the road, blinding oncoming traffic. The cutoff shield helps cut down on glare. This is why, though not technically proper, in my opinion it's okay to do an HID conversion on our headlights. Still, the best way to do an HID setup on any halogen headlight is to retrofit some OEM bi-xenon projectors into the stock headlight, but that is a seriously involved process and not one I would be willing to tackle.
I've actually thought about doing an HID setup on my C350, and honestly, I probably will, but I want to find a decent kit that isn't going to have issues igniting or flickering. . The only thing that makes me kind of iffy about it, is that I feel like having an aftermarket HID kit from China on a Mercedes Benz is a little on the "ghetto" side
Last edited by ||||||||||; Dec 10, 2013 at 02:53 PM.





