Who makes the most reliable HID fog and high beam replacement?

 

Most reliable, or most reliable on a budget? TheRetrofitSource will be the most reliable out of the stuff people will recommend on here (HIDextra, DDM, etc) but it is a bit more expensive.

For fogs you could run a DDM/HIDextra kit and be perfectly content. I would advise against putting HIDs in the high beam, because it is a waste. HIDs need time to warm up, and unless you're running your high beams on for extended periods of time, it will be worse than your halogen bulb.

 

How does the light rating work on HIDs? I keep seeing 10k,15k stuff like that what does that mean?

 

I do alot of open highway driving at nite.

 

The kelvin is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_measurement for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature. It is one of the seven http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_base_unit in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units (SI) and is assigned the unit symbol K. The Kelvin scale is an absolute, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_temperature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_of_temperature using as its null point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero, the temperature at which all thermal motion ceases in the classical description of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamics.



in laymans terms; the higher you go on the Kelvin scale, the more blue or purple the color is.
HOWEVER, and it is a big HOWEVER, the Higher you go on the Kelvin scale, the less Lumens the light produces.

this means, if you do a lot of highway night driving, you'll want to stay with the OEM factory Kelvin temperature bulb. as 4300Kelvin produces the MOST usable light

 

We got 4700KV as OEM which is AMBER and got around 3500-3700lm
on Contrast most just go straight to 5000K which is Ultra White and has a rating of 3400-3600lm.


Any higher and it starts to lose brightness or Lumens but the real Issue is that the light color starts to shift into a darker tone which blends into the roads so even if it has a brighter rating than halogen since its a darker Hue it seems like it has way worse rating well below -1000lms...
6000K = Soft white/Blue = 3300Lm
8000K = Polar White = 2900-3000Lm
From here it shifts into Darker Hue so they are illegal and recommended for show purposes only.
10000K = Light Blue = 1900-2100Lm looks like 1100-1500Lm
12000K = Ultra Blue = 1100-1700Lm looks like 500-800Lm
18000K = Purple = 500-1000Lm looks like 100-300Lm
Stock Halogen Bulb High Beam = 1700Lm.
Stock Halogen Bulb Low Beam = 1100Lm.

 

i helped install an HID kit on a civic si...it came with purple bulbs. Im betting they were close to 10000k
anyways, we took a test drive and I had to completely strain my eyes to see.
it would be worse if it were raining.

 

^^ You gotta look RED HIDs (Something like 35,000KV) they don't even bright up anything!! its just a tone of red that you cant see more than 3-5 meters away..

 

I even complained about the 6k i put in once in the rain. There was a big difference in visibility.