65aircooled

The high beam is not in the projector, it is in the smaller reflector. Even on the bixenon headlapms the high beam is still in the reflector, but there is an electric motor that moves a shutter alowing the projector pass more light from the xenon bulb which in combination with the 55w halogen reflector gives you the high beam.
If you put an HID bulb in the reflector (which is possible) the light will scatter everywhere and will not be as usefull as a bright halogen bulb. Just my opinion.
If the optics are in fact the same as those in the Bixenons I may give the Mtecs a shot for the low beams which are the ones with the worst output.

The Thomas J

Thank you.

LemonSqueezy

Laser beam headlights and fog lights.

The Thomas J

Very nice. You went with all bright white? Do you feel you are blinding oncoming traffic? How much better is he overall visablitly?

Eayacht

Vey nice, are those 35w or 55w?
What did you use on your parking lights? Led's or Hid's

LemonSqueezy

Blinding with headlights? No. Blinding with fog lights? Yes. Overall visibility is much improved with just headlights as long as you use a good kit. Overall visibility with both headlights and fog lights on cannot even compare to halogens.


They are both 55w kits. Expensive but they have both served me very well over the the last 2 years. The parking lights and side marker lights are LED's.

AMGAffalterbach

I did 35w fogs and 55w low beams with Phillips DiamondVision high beams which are 5000k halogens, and like LemonSqueezy nothing compares to how bright they are when used in conjunction with each other. Just make sure you aim your fog lights properly since - at least in my case - they will tend to be tilted up quite a bit. In either case, it's like day light with both fogs and low beam HIDs on (before I aimed my fog lights):

Eayacht

DAMB I should have gone with the 55w Hid's, I put 35w low beam and fogs on mine, thinking they might melt or damage the housing.
Mine do light up the street really nice at night but clearly from this pic your are brighter.

65aircooled

That's really impressive!

AMGAffalterbach

Thanks guys! I'm sure Lemons are even brighter with both being 55w. I'll try to post pictures of the cutoff against my garage door soon!

The Thomas J

Are 55 watts HIDS too much for the fog lights?

I think I want to go 6000 for the low beams, led's for the parking lights. Not sure what I'm going to do for the fog lights, just that I want pure white, just need to figure out the wattage. I'm also going to change the flens on the fog lights, they are a little beat up with rock chips road grime etc...

AMGAffalterbach

I would go 35w for the fog light for longevity as 55w seems a little much for such an enclosed space not to mention they aren't projectors and bright as heck anyway, but that's just my personal opinion. I went 6000k low beams, 5000k LED city lights, 5000k halogen high beams, and 5000k fog lights thinking it would all color match near pure white since 55w washes out color a bit, but honestly wattage doesn't make a huge difference in color. If you want pure white go 5k all around. If you want white with a slight blue tint go 6k all around. As you can tell the lights appear somewhat blue but the light on the road is completely white.

The Thomas J

You & I are very much on the same page when it comes to what i'm looking for. I want the slight blue tint for look, not so much effect.

I was thinking of going 3000k for the driving lights or the fog lights, but I think I want all white.

On my BMW i changed all the lighting, headlight lenes & fog light housing's, used phillps 55w halogen headlight, 35w halogens in the fog lights & added 3000k halos around the headlights that also act as DRL's & it looks really great. I may have to change out the headlights to LED's or HID's now.

LemonSqueezy

And who said w211's lights were dim..

65aircooled

You guys are going to be guilty of bringing me to the dark side... or should I say FROM the dark side? Lol.

Can't wait to see the cutoff pics.
Thanks for all the pics and info

LemonSqueezy

Once you convert to HID's, you'll feel like you want to get LED parking lights to match headlights.. then you'll feel like you want to get clear side markers and white LED's to match those.. then you'll feel like you want white LED dome lights.. which makes you want to get LED footwell lights.. then you'll be getting LED's for the door lights.. and eventually you will end up with something like this..



because it's a disease.. mwahahaha..

Eayacht

I'm glad you posted this picture, let me ask you a question, about a week ago I replaced my dome lights with LEDs, what a big difference when I open the door now at night, yesterday I replaced my footwell lights also with LEDs.

So now when I drive the car at night with the doors closed the footwell lights stay on but dimmed down, when I open the door the get a lot brighter,
Does your do that also ?

Eayacht

BTW your car looks nice at night, your right the LEDs are like a disease, lol
I ordered more LEDs for the doors, I still have the yellow looking lights that shine the floor when you open the door, I think they are called puddle lights.

65aircooled

Silly question:
Wen you convert to HID's and LED's in the front or in all corners, does the system still recognize a bulb out and are you still able to get the instrument cluster message?

LemonSqueezy

Yes mine does that as well. A friend of mine explained it to me once a long time ago. Here's my lousy attempt at repeating it. Lets say the normal wedge bulb requires 10 watts to light up, the canbus led's require only 1 watt, when you swap bulbs, the car is still sending 10 watts to your led bulb so when you turn it off, there's so much residual power remaining and stored into the bulb that it'll take like an hour to fully dissipate all the power and stop glowing, until you open the door again.

LemonSqueezy

Not silly at all, with the correct HID kit and correct LED bulbs you will not have any errors. They will have built in resistors and/or capacitors in them. I do however read a fault on my rear dome lights when I run a test through STAR, I have no idea why, but it doesn't bother me since it's not on my cluster.

65aircooled

I am using a strip of leftover white LED (from my Tundra LED puddle light retrofit) to light up the liquor bottles in my bar at home. The same thing happens when I turn them off, I am using a 12V adapter from an old internet router and it supplies a bit more wattage than the car would. Once turned off they take a few minutes to completely extinguish their light.

The Thomas J

There are far worse diseases to have. Looks great!

AMGAffalterbach

The one thing I will say was my passenger's side low beam was a pain in the butt to get working properly I have no idea why. I had a really weird issue where I thought the ballast went out all of a sudden and I ended up ordering a whole new set of parts to replace them etc, and when I did the issue changed over to the driver's side. The issue is HIDs pull about HALF the amperage of OEM halogens and since it's a smart CANBUS system, even with error eliminators the ballasts still weren't pulling enough amperage and the system thought the bulb was out and cut power, so I had to wire a 2200uf capacitor between the socket on the car and the wiring that goes down to the ballast, and all my weird HID issues have been gone - acts like an extra startup battery and helps pull a consistent current for the igniters but everything looks awesome Lemon!! Also here are some pretty terrible quality cutoff pics, first against a garage door then inside the garage (with the front of the car sitting at the end of the slopped driveway) and you can tell they aren't too bad, definitely more defined in person.

ShinyHypnotoad

You can run 55w....But you run the risk of literally melting your bowl (back part of the projector). You have to get very specific bulbs to make this work, people who use cheap 55w bulbs destroy thier projectors and have to either replace the headlight or do another retrofit to replace the projector.


**and for the love of god please don't go on ebay to buy these things. I bought all of my hardware from here (for my MKV Jetta retrofit to bi-xenon) i've known the owner for a pretty long time and he frequents hidplanet.com all the time.**


Also, are you guys running these with a relay harness? (my wife just got this car and I haven't been able to locate the battery, hopefully its not in a hard to get to place so that I can run a relay from there to the headlamps)