The Lamp Room

I've finally bought a new pair of D2S HID headlight bulbs for the Volvo seeing as the drivers side one is now very pink and so dim it barely lights the road up, and boy, as it turns out, buying HID headlight bulbs is very difficult when all you want is facts and figures & not marketing BS.

I mean take a look at the pictures below:

* Brightness up to +70%, 7 dashes vs 4 - Yeah I eventually managed to find the lumen value for this bulb and it sure as hell isn't +70% over an OEM equivalent bulb
* Distance up to +20m, 6 dashes vs 4 - Right how'd you work that one out?
* Light colour up to +5%, 5 dashes vs 4 - This lamp is 4350K after doing some digging. So it's 5% cooler than something warmer, so what?
* Life time, 4 dashes vs 4. So what's that in hours??

As you can see most of this is marketing wank in its purest form i.e. complete twaddle. It's often quite difficult or even impossible to find very basic values such as lumens, expected lifetime of the lamp (in hours) and colour temperature. I haven't found any information on CRI or lumen maintenance for any bulbs I've looked at.

Oh and don't get me started on the cheap Chinese lamps available in colour temperatures up to 10,000k. Might as well just stick a blue LED in instead.

You're not wrong there, sadly, this is the dumbed-down and totally useless way information is given to the masses these days. Ok, so they've realised that a lot of people won't have a clue what watts and kelvin, etc are and these are the people this twaddle is aimed at. BUT, for the slightly more educated when it comes to lighting, it would be helpful to give us some real facts and figures to enable an educated and informed choice. I know a lot of people will be impressed by the pretty, coloured (and pretty much meaningless) info printed on the side of the box, I'm not one of them.

I'd post what you have above on the Osram facebook page and see what kind of response you get!

Sigh. Tried to fit these today, bought the wrong ones ain't I!! I need D2R of course, not D2S (obviously). Back to Amazon they go.

I've bought some cheepo Ring branded ones now, got a pair for less than the cost of one of these. Probably won't last as long but I likely won't have the car when they need replacing anyway so...

Now sadly these are one HID lamp I would ban!, halide lamp are far too bright for automotive use, but it seems to be a fad now with every young lad out there, modding standard head lights to blinding HID lamps, halogen will always be better for road use, so I don’t see the point in discharge lamps for cars, other than to annoy other road users!

Used to have a H3 HID conversion kit in my motorbike and I got rid of it because the lamps kept melting their electrodes.
Went back to standard halogen and it’s shit tbh...

Now sadly these are one HID lamp I would ban!, halide lamp are far too bright for automotive use, but it seems to be a fad now with every young lad out there, modding standard head lights to blinding HID lamps, halogen will always be better for road use, so I don’t see the point in discharge lamps for cars, other than to annoy other road users!

Retrofitting HID lamps into standard headlights doesn't need to be banned as it's already illegal and has recently been added to the MOT test, meaning any vehicle that has had this done should now fail and have to be converted back to standard halogen lamps.

Projector type HID headlights, I'm not sure about those. These are the ones you're probably thinking of and the type that most people mention, they tend to look like they're flashing at you when coming the other way driving down a bumpy road.

My car has standard reflector headlights that have been properly converted/set-up from the factory meaning they shouldn't produce any considerable glare compared to any other OEM halogen headlight setup, yet they provide far more light on the road which makes things a bit safer and driving on dark, unlit roads a much less stressful experience (great for someone like me that drives at least 50% of the time in this scenario).

Also, long life HID bulbs should last over 10 years. There is no other light source that'd I'd trust to last that long in this particular application (I'm looking at you full-LED headlights).