Sylvania Osram Night Breakers HID Review

[jgold47]

Preamble:
Someone asked me to post my experiences with upgrading my HID's from 'stock' to the new night breakers.

Background:
2004 with AHL. 115K miles. I've owned for about 3 years and about 20K of those miles. I dont drive the car a ton, and rarely at night, but I noticed that my HID's would intermittently cut off, almost imperceptible. I did some reading and it could be a number of different things including the bulbs going bad. with the mileage and age of the car, I thought it would be a good idea to try new bulbs. I settled on the new Osram Nightbreakers after reading about the other options on the market. I dont like Blue Bulbs, and I know the inverse relationship between color temperature and 'brightness', so I was fine with a stock replacement. I looked at the phillips and osram xenarc, but was intrigued by the new night breakers. I got them from the retrofit resource (no fakes), for about 200 bucks shipped (vs 100 shipped for Phillips/Osram OEM types).

Method:
I tried to have a method for this, since pictures of lights never seem to tell the picture. I parked my car in my driveway and took photos with my iphone 5s, car running, phone on, camera on, flash off, in my pocket for 5 seconds to clear the light metering, then out and photo. I took before and after photos (two nights apart) in the exact same spot both nights. I also bought a cheap light meter from Amazon to test this out.

Pre:
Measured 420 on the light meter.





Installation:
I planned on taking off the front bumper using one of the guides on this site. I couldnt get a couple of the bolts off, but I did get the top/bottom/sides loose(just not the center bolts in the middle). This gave me enough room to wiggle the lights out. install is pretty straight forward (pro tip: the back panel is on TIGHT. once off, you cant remove it, just hold it out of the way while doing your replacement. Pro Tip 2: Make sure you replace your side markers at the same time. Much easier to do with the light outs.).

Discovery:
So - I've had this nagging feeling that the car was in an unreported accident prior to my acquisition. I still cant prove it, but.... I had two different HID bulbs! one Phillips and one Xenarc. Since Phillips is the new OEM, perhaps they were replaced legitimately. Regardless, mind blow that they were different. I noticed on the Xenarc that the center section of the bulb was a little cloudy compared to the philips which makes me think it was the older of the two. Now the pictures make more sense. I thought it was just a trick of the photos

Post:
light meter: 650!




Follow up:
I'll post pictures in a month or so once the lights settle in. I've got a long weekend which should have some decent night driving coming up and will give a good on the road impression.