Originally posted by PatrickGSR94
Here are the facts people:
ALL OEM HID headlights are 4300K. The difference in color you see between different manufacturers comes from the optics of the housing. All these 6000K, 8000K, etc. kits are purely for cosmetic purposes only. If you want that you might as well not waste your money and just buy some ghey blue halogen bulbs instead.
Projectors that use H3 bulbs suck because of the transverse (sideways) filament in H3 bulbs. H3 bulbs themselves have a crappy beam pattern.
HID capsules inside an aftermarket Civic projector housing will NOT melt anything, as it only draws 35W, compared to 55 or more for H3's. Add to that the fact that the light is generated by an arc of current, instead of by heating a filament.
I cannot say what the beam pattern and output would be like for a xenon capsule made to replace an H3 bulb, inside a projector housing. If the capsule was designed correctly with the arc the correct distance back from the cutoff shield, the beam pattern might actually be better than with halogen H3 bulbs, but who knows if engineers who made these capsules took the time to do this.
If you really want the BEST light output, you will need to hack open a set of projectors and try to retrofit in something like Audi S4 HID projectors. That's probably big $$$$ though.
right on the dot! optics is everything