US smoked ELIPS 55 watt 6k bulbs....mahhhhhh lighting????

[der affe]

i have always ran H-4's in every car i have owned. i finally went for it and picked up a set of US elips that the lows had already been smoked, added my cross hairs to the highs and installed them with the 55 watt 6K HIDs i bought with the lights. this is my first adventure with projector lights.

well i installed them today, waited for the sun to go down, aimed them and went for a quick drive down some dark streets by my house.

i have to say i was unimpressed!
maybe it is the stupid BLUE lights (according to DDM the 55 watt should have washed out most if not all of the blue.....not so much). it reminds me of those fake HID bulbs from 10 years ago, makes everything blue, but does not help you see farther. i feel like i should be Tokoyo Drifting!

i aimed them a little low because it was hard to tell the cut off. maybe that was part of it. i will try adjusting them a little higher tomarrow and see if that makes a big difference.

i swear that i could see farther and better with my plain old H-4 lights.

i am ordering a set of the 35 watt 3K for my fogs tomarrow and maybe a set of the 35 watt 4K for the high beams i don't really care about being able to flash people (yes , i was told that i would loose that ability if i did this)

i also think i burned out my low beam fuses as they will only work with the high beams now, what fuse are you using in place of the stock one (25-30 amp) when you go with the 55 watt kit?

i was running W123 lights on the highs with a 75 watt bulb so i think i will be fine fuse wise there. as well as the fogs since i was running the same H-1 75 watt bulb there too.

has anyone ran into these problems before and what did you do?

the reflectors were in great shape and the lenses has a little pitting and very little sand blasting to them so i can't blame the disappointing performance on that.

what lights are you running to get a "just plain white light" out of your kits?

[xphiledan]

The problem is the color temperature of the bulb. 6000K is too blue.


Call up DDM and ask them to send you 4300K bulbs. That's the color temp of daylight.

Even though the color may get washed out using the 55W, you will still get a reduced lumen output using that color temp, I believe it's something like 25%. Also another thing is that DDM QC isn't the greatest. I've heard of people receiving bulbs marked for 4300K that was way too blue. So it's possible that your 6000K bulb is really putting out 6500K.

[KennyT]

I love when people tint their headlights then complain about brightness. Also 5700 is the K temp of the sun, thus 5700+/- 100k will give white light irregardless of wattage.

Also projectors, especially older ones, have signifigant loss rates, somewhere between 25% and 40% of output is lost to optics. Then you have more loss to lens imperfections, then more from lens tint. It adds up.

[StereoInstaller1]

I love when people tint their headlights then complain about brightness. Also 5700 is the K temp of the sun, thus 5700+/- 100k will give white light irregardless of wattage.

Also projectors, especially older ones, have signifigant loss rates, somewhere between 25% and 40% of output is lost to optics. Then you have more loss to lens imperfections, then more from lens tint. It adds up.

I can't see Greg putting painted headlights on his car: likely they are smoked properly.

True or not, common belief has it that the painting of the reflector (projector only, duh) does not affect output in any way

[der affe]

no film or painted lenses.
the outer reflector on the low beams was painted black (the silver circle around the outside of the projector lense) which should not effect the light output. the projector lense itself was in good shape and the reflector was also (chroming nice, no pitting, rippling/peeling). then i put the crosshairs painted black in the highbeams. i am also going to put CLEAR lamin-X on everything when it arrives, but the clear should not effect the light out put as it is clear.

maybe i should call it BLACKED out with crosshairs and i am using the wrong terminolgy to describe them.

i called DDM prior to buying them from the seller to find out exactly what the light output would end up like since they say the 55watt will wash out the colour. they told me it would white with just a slight blue tinge to it. well, it is pretty dam BLUE!

if it was a matter of me putting on film to the lenses, i could totally blame the film and my stupidity for putting it on. the fact of the matter is i did this for a lighting up grade not an appearence thing.

i have also had modern HID projectors side by side with regular projectors from US elips And i do not see and great differences. the reflector seems to be similar angles (just looking at it) and the lense does not seem to be any clearer or have different angles to it (again, just eyeballing it). these are HELLA projectors out of BMWs and MBs not a cheap Japanese stuff from an Infinity/Lexus.


i am going to order a set of the 4300K today along with the 35 watt kit for the fogs and re-aim them a little higher tonight. hopefully that will help.

[bp9129]

pictures.......

[Heysüß]

i just got a 55w 6k kit from DDM and for a second I was impressed.

My left beam was REALLY bright it made up for the fact that the right one was on the fritz. Today I go and swap sides to see what the problem could be and the son of bitches evened out but not to a brighter degree (IMO) the bright one seemed to tone down. My dad says I'm crazy but i'm pretty sure I'm not.

I'm gonna check the wiring on this tomorrow and I hadn't thought about changing the fuse. Is this a normal thing to do if you want them to be brighter.

One test I did to see if they did tone down was drive on the same lonely back road to my gf house. It just got repaved and had new reflector thingys. My left beam used to light these up great and now they barely light them up. Any advice or suggestions?

[der affe]

changing the fuses wont make them brighter, but i had heard that you might need to up grade the fuse from the 7.5 that is in there orginally to something of a higher amperage. this is when you use the 55 watt kits.

i am pretty sure that the low beam fuses both crapped out. i have been driving my dad to dr's apointments all day today so i have not had time to check yet. they work on the highs, but not on the lows. well the drivers side did for a couple of seconds then died.

i will order the other kits and bulbs tomarrow morning. hopefully that will solve the problem.

i think most of our problem is the stupid blue lights (6K) a lower K like a 4K or a 43K would be better suited to actually seeing better.

[der affe]

pics....see no stupid tint film





once the sun goes down, i will shoot some of the lights on

[gearheadE30]

I got 5000k 55w recently, and its only a little more blue than the OEM Infiniti HIDs on our FX35 for reference. If you want white, 4300 sounds good.

[DaveSmed]

I'm no help, H4/H1s are a tough to beat lighting setup in an E30.

That said, the 55w HID kits always seemed sketch, in my experience (for all that's worth :P ) they were always much less reliable and not much brighter than the cheaper 35w kits.

You could always crosshair the H4s, treat them to some HL78159/HL78130 bulbs, and call it a day.....

Oh yea, relays are a must if you do that. Highbeam power consumption will be close to 40A. 460W of lighting is close to X-ray vision though.

[bp9129]

pics....see no stupid tint film





once the sun goes down, i will shoot some of the lights on

Why are your lenses foggy as shit? That might have something to do with it

[StereoInstaller1]

Why are your lenses foggy as shit? That might have something to do with it

OK, now I am pretty convinced you might be an idiot.

Say something else, prove it true one way or the other.

[bp9129]

I know they're "smoked", but they look more foggy than anything. Maybe just pitted to shit but they don't even look black lol

[gearheadE30]

^^ the fluting of the glass causes them to look a little gray where the outer reflector was painted, and the design of the internal optics and due to incoming light means that the projector part is never actually black. What you're probably seeing is ambient light being reflected back towards the lense. Pitting, however, can contribute to this.