I am considering a headlight upgrade for a 97 civic, after looking at brighter than stock halogen i read that a bright bulb's life is nearly half of stock bulb.

So now i am looking into hid alternative, projectors and all. any thoughts on ebay halo/projector kits, or led/projector? i have a couple in mind that look decent r8 style in particular.

 

No such thing. Everyone will tell you to do a retrofit.

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/SLIM-HID-96-...sories&vxp=mtr

the retrofit looks like an insane amount of work.

 

And that set of headlights looks hideous.

 

QQ

http://www.ebay.com/itm/96-98-Civic-...sories&vxp=mtr

theres a diff one.

 

Cleaner. But there's no way to tell what kind of light output you're going to get with these. Chances are not good with the cheap price. On top of that they may be prone to leaking or condensation.

 

most of those projectors headlights have worse output than stock.. the projectors in them arent even meant to run hids.. go and do a retro like someone mentioned above, that someone would bring it up.. with a retro, you can customize them anyway you want.. leds, angel eyes.. painting or leaving it chrome.. removing amber..

 

i'll look into the retrofit a little more,

i have had ebay projectors with hid (came with the car) and the main point of the projector is to keep the light from blinding people. they worked okay very good visibility. although projector headlights with halogen bulbs are fail.

 

if its a halogen projector and you put hids in, it will glare.. the projector bowl isnt designed to focus the light correctly..

 

I don't mean to hijack this thread but I have some questions in regard to what Joon Joon said.

So I bought these headlights for my 96 HB....
http://www.andysautosport.com/honda/...d00109362.html

Those headlights don't have the standard OEM bulb style in them. They're the tiny little buggers. I was told by one of my good friends that works at a local parts store that 55v is the legal limit here. Well they're dim as hell so he ordered me the utility vehicle 130v for them. They were really cheap and I figured the brighter the better. I haven't yet installed the actual lights. Now if I were wanting to go the HID route down the road are you saying I'd have to buy new(or used) OEM headlights for my civic in order to run HID's? I don't have mine because they were both completely destroyed in an accident.

From what research I did I can't find any HID bulbs that are going to be small enough to fit inside my halo lights and if the lens itself is going to couteract the lights then..... Anyways if Joon Joon, or anyone, could shed some light on this it'd be great!

Pun intended

 

you dont need oems.. you can use aftermarket oem styles.. its hard to retro into aftermarket projector headlights.. 55w bulbs are stock halogens.. 35w is stock for oem hids..

 

Sorry I wrote volts and meant watts. My bad. I don't think I'll be able to retro into my current aftermarket lights anyways because the hole for the bulb is so small I can barely fit the little bulb in there. If I ever get some free time(working 70-80 hours a week) I'll have to mess around with it. Thanks for the info none the less.

I'm guessing the 130w's I have now are gonna pull a lot more power from the car then right? I wonder how bad that's gonna be on the car...

 

its going to and you might have a problem with it heating up the stock wiring.. so you should run a relay harness..

 

Ah yeah I didn't even think about that. Well maybe it might just be safer to run the bulbs that came with the headlights for now. So then if HID's are my next upgrade is there a certain type of headlight I should use that would be more beneficial(and have less glare) than the ones I have now?

 

use oem or oem aftermarkets then do a retrofit..

 

I realize now that I asked a question to which you already answered. Sorry. Thanks again for the help.