DEFIANTLY go for it! HIDs with projectors make a WORLD of difference in night driving. I will post up some comparisons.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FORMULa  I would get them, i got them for my mustang (not projectors) and compared to regular lights, visibility went up greatly. Im happy i got them. |
Just a note for everyone, but what he is talking about is that he put HIDs in freeform
headlight fixtures vs putting them in a projector housing. While this may or may not be illegal, it is NOT a good idea to put HIDs in free form light housings as it WILL blind oncoming drivers and is even worse than driving with your highbeams on.
Simply put, the difference between projectors and freeform is that a projector housing consists of 3 things; the light source, cutoff, and lens. The light source is put behind a cutoff which is usually just a piece of metal so that the bottom half of the light is COMPLETELY cut off. This is then followed by a lens, which like your eyes, flips the image around so that you essentially got the light being cut off on the top so you won't blind oncoming drivers.
Projector light housings with HIDs light output will look like this:
Freeform lights are done one of two ways: satellite style reflection and literally, freeform depending on the lens used in front of the light. In older style lights, the best way to describe it is to look at a flash light. The bulb is sitting in the bottom of a reflective cone and all the light is just shot out. The 'cutoff' here is usually manipulated by the lens out front with designs cut into it. This is HIGHLY in effective as it will still through a LOT of light out everywhere, and just tries to get as much light as possible down at the bottom. This was good pre-HIDs as it helped give more light at night, but generally bad for oncoming drivers. Now-a-days you won't see this rather satellite style lights. Think of a satellite dish, and now imagine that behind the receive/sender, there is the light bulb which shoots out at the little thing in the center, which is usually metal/plastic shaped to throw most the light toward the bottom. Still not an exact science as light is still reflected all around the dish.
This will be an example of HIDs put on freeform lights:
And to show the difference between freeform and projector lights, here you will see two different headlight housings. The one on the left is a projector style as you can tell by the clear lens in the middle. The one on the right is a freeform light with the lens trying to control the light output instead of a real cutoff.
