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.

[Quicksilver]

So was there a specific color temperature difference between the xenarc and the night breakers?

[jgold47]

Phillips:

• Kelvin and Lumens (35W)

• 4300K: Warm White (~3200 lm)

Xenarc

• Kelvin and Lumens (35W)

• 4200K: Warm White (~3200 lm)

Night Breakers:
Color:4200Warm WhiteLuminosity:3500 (estimated)

all from the retrofit resource website.

on the xenarc - the suggest that the currently available model is a different model than the original one. assuming at least one of mine is original, I may have had an older model.

[TiAgX5]

Comparing old HID bulbs to new ones will not give any usable info regarding what bulb is better. HID bulbs lose brightness after years of usage.

[jgold47]

Originally Posted by TiAgX5

Comparing old HID bulbs to new ones will not give any usable info regarding what bulb is better. HID bulbs lose brightness after years of usage.

I wasnt speculating on which was better. Just posting my experiences with the new ones. If the other guys was asking the color temp between new and old, that wasnt what I was trying to answer.

[Ricky Bobby]

Glad you like them bro! And glad you stuck with a stock color temp bulb!

[TiAgX5]

Originally Posted by jgold47

I wasnt speculating on which was better. Just posting my experiences with the new ones. If the other guys was asking the color temp between new and old, that wasnt what I was trying to answer.

I was referring to the light meter readings of the old bulbs vs new ones.

In 10 years, the new bulbs will have about the same output as the bulbs you just removed.

[jgold47]

Gotcha. Thought it was interesting how much they were off from each other. If nothing else it's good motivation for folks still running stock bulbs to switch to newer ones regardless of which.

[TiAgX5]

I had no idea the HID bulbs dropped off with age.

I mentioned lower output and a purple color shift in a thread on here, Ricky Bobby suggested I replace them. Big difference.

Went with OE color temp HID bulbs (from HIDBulbsRUs) and installed a set of PIAA H9 Xtreme White 4150k in the fogs (50% more lumen output), Brightness and color match are identical now.

[Ricky Bobby]

Yeah at around 1500 hours or so they are about half the original brightness, the salts degrade over time in the capsule.

At all of our X's age we should be at least on our second set of OE bulbs by now!