Just wondering, I picked up so sylvania silver star bulbs the other day, and yeah they are not so great, I think they are a bit better at night, it seems you can see things further away a bit better, but closer is doesn't appear to have help at all, in fact I think I see less... Anyways so doing a bit of research today I ran across some silvestar posts on Nabisco, and it seems I needed to buy the osram silverstars, not the silvanias.... SO these bulbs need to be changed, I almost bought some other silver stars, but then I ran across the HIR bulb info, and these sound like the way to go, without doubt, but there is very little info out there about them, I was wondering if anyone local was running HIR bulbs? Not to mention the silverstars I'm running right now are a tad bluer than I thought they would be, and I'm not so crazy about how that looks with the fog lights.
I have some bulbs that I bought from Best Buy that run high wattage. 90w low, 100w high beam. They have a blue tint on them, which I don't like at all, but I only bought them because of the wattage output. I wouldn't buy another set of these anymore if they were to blow out. The factory bulbs light up and highlight things a lot better. If you just drive in the city, these blue tinted bulbs would be fine, but if you're going everywhere, the stock ones are hard to beat. There are also the Cool Blue from Wal-mart, they look fine and the tint isn't much so lighting is still outputted 'ok'. OR you can just go HID... If you come make it out to Firestone this friday or whenever, You can take a look at my headlights, I'm not responsible for blindness.
I'm too cheap for HID's but these HIR I've been reading about sound perfect, sounds like they put out way more light at basically the same wattage, and run as cool as stock and last just as long for around $70. Other than that I'm super leary of "100 watt" bulbs I bought some for my bike and I could hardly see at night, which sucks even more on a bike. I'm probably going to just go ahead with these new bulbs anyways, just wondering if anyone local has 'em. I'll be sure and check out you lights when I can make it out one of these days.
AFAIK HIR blubs are only for high beam headlights. Now i am sure they can be retro fitted for low beams, but i think they only make a couple of sizes for HIR bulbs. They were used in the production Vipers for headlights; and those are the ones that can be used in our high beams with very little modification. If you e mail Daniel Stern http://www.danielsternlighting.com/ he can answer almost all your questions here is a good post http://forums.nasioc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=711351&highlight=HIR
Couple things, it does require a bit of bulb modification, but you can do them for both hi and low beams. And the thread you posted on nabisco we bumped by the poster for me I'm going to do it.
I was just going by this quote from nhluhr "HIR technology doesn't apply to dual-filament bulbs like the H4 because the glass has to be spherical and the center of the globe needs to be focused on the filament to make it work correctly. With H4, you have two filaments so they aren't in the center of the bulb like with single-filament bulbs like the 9005 and 9006 that 9011 and 9012 can replace." and our driving lights are H4 correct?
Mine are H1s, as long as you're stock yours should be too. It's 9012 that can be modified to fit IIRC, they were talking about H4 for a different model/year.
