Unlike halogens that require large reflective housings, HID headlights are smaller and more versatile. This gives both automotive designers and aftermarket customizers an opportunity for exciting new looks. LED lighting is becoming increasingly popular, too, but Kossoff says HID is still the favored choice for headlight applications.
We can only wait to see if HIDs will have the half-century staying power of the old, sealed-beam headlights. Know How. Since becoming an auto news and reviews contributor at AutoTrader. A committed advocate for automotive media professionals, Nick is a member of the Greater Atlanta Automotive Media Association.
Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. ONLY Our easy-to-use BulbFinder will let you find the correct bulb, step by step. HID, or high-intensity discharge light bulbs and lamps, are a family of gas-discharge arc lamps which create light by sending an electrical discharge between two electrodes and through a plasma, or ionized gas.
An additional gas is generally used, and this gas serves as an easy way to classify the major types of HID lamps: Mercury, sodium, and metal halide. These lamps are known for their high efficiency at turning electricity into light and their long rated life. HID lamps require a ballast in order to generate the initial surge of electricity needed to start them and to regulate their power during normal operation.
The basic technology for the gas-discharge lamp has existed for over years, and these same principals also guided innovations in other lighting types such as fluorescent and neon. For you as well as your fellow motorists, xenon lights provide a clearer picture from further away in times and places where light is otherwise scarce.
Additionally, HIDs make it easier to read driving signs on dark roads. A further benefit of the clarity and safety that HID brightness offers is the level of farsightedness you get during nighttime commutes.
This ability to see things instantly and more clearly from greater distances can help you prevent disasters and get to your destination in less time, and also cut down on fuel costs. Simply put, HIDs are the best headlight bulbs for night driving. With the growing popularity of HIDs among motorists, a growing number of people are asking one simple question: Are xenon and halogen bulbs interchangeable?
More specifically, can you replace halogen headlights with HIDs? While the latter is no doubt the better option when it comes to headlights, replacing the old with the new is a more complicated matter because of how certain vehicles are designed to position the direction of light from particular bulbs. On older vehicles that by and large use halogen bulbs, the filaments are directed to interrelate with the reflector and refractor components in the headlight enclosure.
That means the direction the light beams from a pair of halogen headlights is designed internally to be very specific in its aim. The purpose here is to position the light in a way that makes roads and surroundings appear with clarity in the dark, but also to make the light bearable — as in noticeable but not blinding — to oncoming motorists.
Consequently, HID headlights could fail to properly beam in older vehicles that were built to house halogen bulbs. To this day, few upgrade kits have been developed with any degree of light placement or shielding. This means if you buy a HID kit with the intention of changing out halogen bulbs on an older vehicle, the results could be problematic on the road.
The new lights would very likely beam too high and impose blinding light on other motorists at intersections and along narrow, two-way streets, as well as in the rear-view mirrors of drivers ahead. The way around this potential problem is to purchase HID headlights that have been designed to beam properly from older vehicles. As the leading name in the retrofitting industry, The Retrofit Source Inc.
As with halogen lights, xenon lights are named after the gas within that particular bulb type. Meanwhile, HID is short for high-intensity discharge, which is how xenon lights function. Basically, HID headlights beam a light-emitting plasma that forms through a combination of xenon gas and vaporized salt, which are activated on an arc by a ballast in the range of 30, V and sustained in the voltage range of 80 to V.
But even though halogen bulbs have long been an industry standard, they consume wasteful amounts of energy and generate undue heat just to stay activated. So needless to say, when I was in lighting training and first heard about high intensity discharge HID lighting technology, I had no real framework for what that was or where it was used.
It just sounded foreign. And, well, intense. Did you know that HID lamps were the culprit for the minute delay during the Super Bowl a few years back? I learned that, and understood why the delay was so lengthy, during training. I also learned how the technology works and what makes it so powerful, as well as the pros and cons of using it in your application. Over the years, I've seen these things practically applied in an everyday setting. HID lamps have an arc which passes between two electrodes in a pressurized tube causing various metallic additives to vaporize and release large amounts of light.
The electricity first enters through the ballast in the fixture containing an HID lamp. The starter inside the ballast provides the initial high-voltage jolt of electricity, which ignites the HID bulb.
What is a ballast? We explain it here.
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