Interior/Exterior HID conversion of MINI
#51
04-01-2005, 10:13 AM
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I was the one that was wrong, I apologize.
I'm sorry, it's been a bad day so far BUT I STILL get frustrated trying to follow a post when people are all hollering about legalities. I'm not debating the fact that it is illegal to use these in a non OEM and/or retrofit setting. But you can't force people to change thier minds. Let people do thier thing and if they get busted they get busted.
I'm sorry, it's been a bad day so far BUT I STILL get frustrated trying to follow a post when people are all hollering about legalities. I'm not debating the fact that it is illegal to use these in a non OEM and/or retrofit setting. But you can't force people to change thier minds. Let people do thier thing and if they get busted they get busted.
Last edited by doomsdaybob; 04-02-2005 at 05:46 AM. Reason: I was wrong, sorry.
#52
04-01-2005, 11:11 AM
Originally Posted by doomsdaybob
I think you are all missing the point! He already has Xenon lows on his car. He is installing Xenons for the highs. He doesn't plan to drive around w/ his highs on all the time so it should be nothing worse than having your aux driving lights on w/ your high beams. Too many people jump around here w/o fully reading the post and understanding it fully. 
I'm sorry, it's been a bad day so far and I get frustrated trying to follow a post when people are all hollering about legalities. I'm not debating the fact that it is illegal to use these in a non OEM and/or retrofit setting. But you can't force people to change thier minds. Let people do thier thing and if they get busted they get busted.
I'm sorry, it's been a bad day so far and I get frustrated trying to follow a post when people are all hollering about legalities. I'm not debating the fact that it is illegal to use these in a non OEM and/or retrofit setting. But you can't force people to change thier minds. Let people do thier thing and if they get busted they get busted.
Here's his sig..sounds like he had halogens in the low and hi beams. So what point did we miss? :smile:
2004 MC CVT Pure Silver,Prem,Cold,MTH,ProMini Intake,Stock 15s,black bonnet-boot strips, Silverstar High&low beams,brake light mod,stickers for speed, 05CupHolder,Ian's auto-up,cheesy grin(My MC)
2005 MCC CVT Astro Black,Prem,Sport,Cold,DSC, Xenons(Sister's MC)
#53
04-04-2005, 08:03 PM
Former Vendor
above and beyond legality comes safety and effectiveness
please read this...this is what i was trying to convey...you are only making things worse on yourself and other drivers without using the proper headlight housings
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disadvantages of HID
There are physiological disadvantages to HID auto headlamps that do not exist with glowing-filament lamps.
Probably the biggest issue is HID headlamps' significantly worse color rendering index (CRI), which is in the high-60s to low-70s range. Halogen headlamps' CRI tends to be around 90 to 97 or so. In English, this means that the human eye's color perception and differentiation is much, much better under halogen light than under the light produced by automotive HID headlamps.
Now, how do we reconcile this with the ad copy that seems universally to talk about how HID headlamps' light is closer to daylight? Well, from a color temperature standpoint, that's generally true. However, that's not the whole story. Color temperature is only one factor that goes into describing the quality of light from such a thing as a headlamp. But here's the tricky part: There's no evidence that "closer to daylight" is the right stuff to drive with at night. Sure, an easy case can be made by just assuming that because daylight is what we have during the day, daylight is what we ought to have at night, too. But it isn't that simple at all. The eye has a very different set of jobs to do, using a different box of tools, at night compared to the job and tools during the day. The extent to which this influences your safety behind HID headlamps is not currently known. The full extent of the current knowledge on the topic as relates to current HID headlamps is "You can probably see colors well enough to be safe". But that's it! (Note that it's from the same researchers who say that you can see well enough to be safe when driving e.g. a '93-'97 Camaro with those miniature oblong sealed beams...) So all the hype about "closer to daylight" is really meaningless in the real world, and may in fact be misleading; there is research showing improved distance perception with headlight of *lower* color temperature, for any given intensity. Certainly any kind of shift towards the blue (as with HID headlamps) is a step in the wrong direction in inclement weather (fog, rain, snow, etc.).
please read this...this is what i was trying to convey...you are only making things worse on yourself and other drivers without using the proper headlight housings
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disadvantages of HID
There are physiological disadvantages to HID auto headlamps that do not exist with glowing-filament lamps.
Probably the biggest issue is HID headlamps' significantly worse color rendering index (CRI), which is in the high-60s to low-70s range. Halogen headlamps' CRI tends to be around 90 to 97 or so. In English, this means that the human eye's color perception and differentiation is much, much better under halogen light than under the light produced by automotive HID headlamps.
Now, how do we reconcile this with the ad copy that seems universally to talk about how HID headlamps' light is closer to daylight? Well, from a color temperature standpoint, that's generally true. However, that's not the whole story. Color temperature is only one factor that goes into describing the quality of light from such a thing as a headlamp. But here's the tricky part: There's no evidence that "closer to daylight" is the right stuff to drive with at night. Sure, an easy case can be made by just assuming that because daylight is what we have during the day, daylight is what we ought to have at night, too. But it isn't that simple at all. The eye has a very different set of jobs to do, using a different box of tools, at night compared to the job and tools during the day. The extent to which this influences your safety behind HID headlamps is not currently known. The full extent of the current knowledge on the topic as relates to current HID headlamps is "You can probably see colors well enough to be safe". But that's it! (Note that it's from the same researchers who say that you can see well enough to be safe when driving e.g. a '93-'97 Camaro with those miniature oblong sealed beams...) So all the hype about "closer to daylight" is really meaningless in the real world, and may in fact be misleading; there is research showing improved distance perception with headlight of *lower* color temperature, for any given intensity. Certainly any kind of shift towards the blue (as with HID headlamps) is a step in the wrong direction in inclement weather (fog, rain, snow, etc.).
#54
11-04-2006, 04:52 AM
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#55
11-04-2006, 06:13 AM
The pros and cons of HIDs have been well hashed out in this thread.
Mostly it comes down to personal preference.
#56
11-04-2006, 10:19 AM
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Just wanna clear something up. By US DOT Standards, OE HID do not have to have auto-level. That is a fact as most cars sold in the US that came from factory HID do not have auto-level. Some cars have a manual leveling switch.
In Europe, to have factory HIDs means auto-level AND headlight washers-- that is a European standard, not US.
Would I recommend putting a HID system in a tungsten filament based reflector or a etched lens? Heck no.
In Europe, to have factory HIDs means auto-level AND headlight washers-- that is a European standard, not US.
Would I recommend putting a HID system in a tungsten filament based reflector or a etched lens? Heck no.
#57
08-05-2007, 02:33 PM
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it seems like its saying that a pre 09/03 built cooper needs additional hardware and programming to get FACTORY OEM Xenons to be retrofitted.
http://www.motoringfile.com/files/2005_headlights.pdf
Is this correct? Im buying some '04 OEM Xenons to retrofit my 10/02 built '03 Cooper. Has anyone done a retrofit with somthing built earlier than 9/03?
Thanks!!
******Question answered......
http://www.motoringfile.com/files/2005_headlights.pdf
Is this correct? Im buying some '04 OEM Xenons to retrofit my 10/02 built '03 Cooper. Has anyone done a retrofit with somthing built earlier than 9/03?
Thanks!!
******Question answered......
Last edited by burley; 08-06-2007 at 05:15 PM. Reason: Question answered
#58
08-07-2007, 10:42 AM
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