Metal Halide has been the main-stay of high powered sports lighting for decades and provides very good light economically. A frustrating fact of metal halides is that once they turn off they have a significant re-start time of about 10 minutes. Like halogens, the heat comes out the front, allowing for light weight, typically metal pressed bodies or housings and glass fronts. In fact, a metal halide lamp will lose 25% of its original performance within the first 250 hours of use. These types of lighting are more efficient than halogen but their useful life peaks very quickly, and their performance deteriorates after a few hundred hours. Metal Halide and Sodium Vapour are discharge lamps, much like a fluorescent tube, where the gas is the lamp is glowing, rather than a filament like with halogen. The main advantage of halogen is that they are cheap to buy but are really only suitable for small club or personal use due to their short life span and inefficiencies. This means the lamps can be quite small and mounted easily. However, the heat is all out the front of the lamp so the housing can be made from any material (metal, aluminium, plastic etc) and the front lens (typically glass) manages the heat. As a large part of the energy goes into the heat side of the equation, the halogen light is not very efficient from an energy perspective and is generally only able to be used for small court type sports like tennis. This glows, producing light and a lot of heat. Traditional halogen lamps use a filament which heats up as the electricity passes through. All have benefits and disadvantages in certain circumstances and it’s important to understand these when considering an upgrade or changing lights. Filament (halogen), discharge (metal halide and HID) and LED. (Is it just ME - or am I the only one who misses the old-school floorboard "clicker" for normal / brights.There are currently three main forms of lighting used in sport applications. It seems that no matter the time or place, there is ALWAYS some idiot driving towards you where you should turn-off the "brights" In our part of the country, you can almost never use your high-beams, unless you are REALLY in the "back-country". If a light is out, not always easy to determine if problem is bulb or Ballast Replacement Ballast = $400 ish, and burried within Bumper Trim They were NICE (threw a good, white, bright beam) BUT: Had HID Bi-Xenon on my previous Volvo S60-R The truck costs a little more (3x) but everything is modular & replaceable I think. It's about a $70 upgrade for a pair of those (housings & hid kit), so pretty close to the same price as the silverstars I usually put in it. The van lights are another story - they seem more prone to cracking by rocks, or maybe it's just because it sees more miles on the road. Hopefully it's reliable - I don't remember changing the headlights since I bought my truck 8 years ago. Some of those CCFL patterns I see completely replace the daytime running lights and are very bright by themselves. I went with the lower power (35 watt instead of 55 watt) in both, too. I'm not too interested in drawing more attention and definitely don't need help upsetting anyone, so I'll be carefully adjusting these. I'm sure that some I've seen that have made an impression on me were just LED or HID "upgrades" in a halogen reflector. The projector lenses are found in more modern cars, not all of them, but look at the big round bulbous lens, that's called a projector lens I believe - if you put an HID (xenon) or LED in a halogen reflector they'll scatter light all over and blind other drivers, but if you run it through the projector lens it's supposed to shape the pattern with a defined cutoff, & that needs to be adjusted so it's not too high. I'll change them if I draw too much attention. I'll be giving out lessons: You think those are my brights?! HERE'S MY BRITES!
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