HID Lighting Comparo Photogrpaphs / Cross-Posted

[Marco Prozzo]

Well, what started out as a simple photograph showing the difference
between my new Touratech integral HID light has grown into a more
complete lighting roundup! I'm not sure how this all happened, but
somewhere between myself, fellow GS'er Steve Irby, and my good friend
Domic Groves of Cycoactive/Touratech, it has become what you will see
at the link below.

The idea was to compare different types of auxilliary lighting
available for the GS. The benefits of which has been discussed ad
nauseam on the various lists. I have had enough close calls at night
to say this: If you are riding in wilderness, try your best not to get
stuck riding at night. If you have to ride at night in the wilderness,
your best defense against the roaming critters a buggin' right and
left, is a good set of auxiliary lights that let you see as far down
the road as possible. This was my reason for mounting a Touratech
integral HID light in my 1150GS in place of my high beam. This is
actually a Hella integral HID headlight housing, and separate HID
ballast, with a mounting kit designed and marketed by Touratech. See
my earlier post for more information on that kit.

On to the comparison. Last night at around 9pm, five of us, and one
large dog, met at a highly secretive testing grounds to conduct our
highly scientific and exacting lighting tests (NOT!). Actually I think
we did a damn good job at showing some fundamental differences that you
may not see in other testing, though I do think our external lamps
could have been adjusted a bit wider. Regardless, here is what we
worked with, and how we did these tests:

There were four bikes used.

My 1150 with stock low beam, the Touratech integral HID high beam, and
a pair of PIAA 520's (the more yellowish ion version of the large,
street-legal PIAA pancake style aux lights).

Steve Irby's 1150GS with the full stock lighting setup housed in a
Touratech Desierto fairing, and also a pair of PIAA 520's.

Touratech/Cycoactive's F650 Dakar bike with integral HE Projector
headlight replacement (both low and high beams are replaced by this
unit), and with both an externally mounted Touratech HID Projector
Beam, as well as an externally mounted Touratech fog lamp.

Touratech/Cycoactive's Monster Cow 1150GS with stock low beam, integral
HID high beam (same as my bike), and a pair of PIAA 540's (the
white-light version of the 520's on the other two 1150's).

The first step was to adjust all the lights so they were approximately
aimed the same. We did this by lining up all four bikes in front of a
flat wall with demarcations along the wall so it was very easy to see
the level of each of the lights. We aligned the auxilliary lights to
correspond approximately to the height of the stock high beam. Slight
variances can readily be seen in comparing the photographs and can be
attributed partially to the fact that one person was weighing down each
of the four subject bikes, while four different folks were used to
adjust the beams.

Once the lights had all been adjusted we rode a short distance to our
solitary, isolated, secret testing grounds, a long stretch of straight,
untraveled road about 25 feet wide. Using a tape measure we marked off
with orange cones every 50 feet up to 150 feet (this is what I'm
guessing would be an approximation of an optimum stopping distance at
about 60mph, assuming your reaction time is pretty darn good. For good
measure we continued to mark off intervals of 50 feet beyond that up to
300 feet with white flowers we pulled from a tree. The greatest
distance marked is 300 feet. We put the subject bike just to the right
of the crown of the road, the camera (a Nikon D2H) immediately behind
it and slightly above the rider's head to show more of the road. It
was mounted on a tripod and set manually at the same setting for all
photographs (except the portraits at the end of course), which was 4
seconds at f8 with the digital sensitivity set for ISO 400.
Furthermore I set the color temp the same for each to give some idea of
how the coloration of the lights differ. The color temp was set at
5000K or just a bit below normal daylight. In the distance there was
Kimmo Lassila (Touratech/Cycoactive) at 100 feet to the left side of
the road. At 150 feet is my lovely wife, Shaun, and our sweet
bullmatiff, Diesel, who volunteered to wear his Xmas Reindeer antlers
just for our test! And at a whopping 300 feet away.....that's 100
yards folks....is Steve Irby wearing his highly reflective safety vest.
Weighing down all the bikes and on lighting duty is the highly capable
Dominic Groves (Touratech/Cycoactive). And heading up this motley crew
on digital camera duty is yours truly.

I put the results on a very simplistic website and titled the images by
the lights being used. Of those titles "1150" is my bike, "1150-2" is
Steve Irby's bike, and "1150-3" is the Touratech bike, as is the 650
Dakar. In the case of the 650 we wanted to show the external lights
independent of the integral headlamps, so we covered the integral
lights for those shots since they were not on a separate switch.

Results were no surprise at all, other than the degree to which HID
lamps give a significant edge over the stock lamps and even the PIAA's.
The external projector HID did impressively well considering their
size, and bested all the PIAA's and stock lights too, coming close to
the performance of the integral HID. In the pictures of the group of
us the bikes line up as follows from left to right: My 1150 which is
off axis to the camera, Steve's 1150, Touratech 1150, and the Dakar
650. The two bikes on the right are on axis to the camera so you can
get some idea of how bright those HID's appear in comparison to the
other lights. The HID on my bike is also on, but at off-axis angles
does not appear as bright.

Pictured from left to right are me and my wife Shaun, Steve Irby,
Diesel, Kimmo Lassila, and Dominic Groves. I am missing from the final
pic, and Diesel is not to be confused with Steve as they have swapped
places.

Draw your own conclusions as I'm getting tired of typing here and
conclusions are fairly obvious. I can only say, that in person, the
differences are profound and as far as I'm concerned the money for a
good HID unit like the one Touratech markets is money well-spent if you
ride at night in the country.

Here's the link to the pictures on two different pages. Click on the
thumbnails to get a bigger pic, then use the arrows to page through the
results.

http://www.marcoprozzo.com/HID

Best to all,

Marco

[Jim Bud]

Nice job, I wish you would have included a set of PiAA 910's for comparison.

clearly the HID blows away any 55W light.

Thanks

[Marco Prozzo]

Originally Posted by Jim Bud

Nice job, I wish you would have included a set of PiAA 910's for comparison.

clearly the HID blows away any 55W light.

Thanks

Thanks Jim. Yeah, it would have been nice to have a few more different lights to compare. It was fun to do and we all had a good time. Well, Diesel got kind of bored! As it was we didn't get back home till after midnight so these were plenty to work with. I think the PIAA 540's use 85W bulbs, don't they? They actually faired best of the non-HID aux lights. Someone correct me on the wattage if I'm wrong. HID definitely has everything going for it.

Marco

[Sirby]

I must say, I was nearly knocked over by the photon rush that hit me every time Nick hit the HID lights Monday night. I was 100 yards away and could not look directly at the HID beam for more than a second. I was very impressed at how much the HID floods the terrain along both sides of the road with a sharp directed "Box Beam" of light. When they were aligning the lights on the big wall, the rectangular pattern was very clear, seeming to focus the light where you want it. Very cool. I gotta get one.

-Sirby

[TonyA]

Marco,

Good work, it takes some time to document all that, eh?

With how good your HID high beams are, I'd ditch the 520 driving beams as being wimpily redundant, switching to 520 fogs to widen overall coverage. But that's just me.

If I owned 1150-2 I'd adjust those stock beams upwards: the lows by a little, and the highs a bit more.

[pierce]

Interesting, the best LOW beam there is the F650...


IMHO, none of those driving lights are suitable for use with lowbeams in traffic.

I'm curious, what is the 'Integral DE low' used on that F650? is that a Hella DE foglamp ? Or something else?

[Marco Prozzo]

Originally Posted by TonyA

Marco,

Good work, it takes some time to document all that, eh?

With how good your HID high beams are, I'd ditch the 520 driving beams as being wimpily redundant, switching to 520 fogs to widen overall coverage. But that's just me.

If I owned 1150-2 I'd adjust those stock beams upwards: the lows by a little, and the highs a bit more.

Thanks Tony- Yes, it was a bit of work, but with all the good company I think we all had a lot of fund doing it too.

As far as the 520 goes, I'd agree with you if my objective were strictly lighting the road up at night. But the other use for aux lights, which I think is also very important, is providing conspicuity for oncoming traffic during the day. Two widely spaced lights provides a visual cue allowing oncoming traffic to gauge your oncoming speed. This does not occur with one light or a tightly clustered group of multiple lights. This is my primary reason for retaining my 520's mounted on a Zbar as daylight running lights. Your point about swapping them out for fog lights is well taken as they would be less offensive at night. But I don't think the wider patch of road PIAA 520 fogs would illuminate would be of much use at speed as far as safety/avoidance is concerned. The fog lights typically only illuminate to a distance of around 50 ft. At 60mph seeing something moving at the side of the road at 50 ft or less ain't likely to give even the best rider enough time to respond in time. The huge swath of road to the sides, and way out ahead, that the HID illuminates is a far more useful as far as illuminating the sides of the road is concerned. If I'm having to ride in the mountains at night I often point my left PIAA driving light off-axis to illuminate the left side of the road side up ahead. Not great for oncoming traffic, but I've always been able to dim them in time. The 520 ion's are very directional so there is a pretty narrow beam of offending light anyway.

As far as the 1150-3 light adjustments, indeed you could be right. Kimmo was weighing that bike down during the adjusting process. He does have a few pounds on Nick I think (my guess is Kimmo's about 30lbs heavier). Also, in order to stay out of the camera's way Nick was having to duck down low for each exposure. Just one of the less-than scientific details unfortunately. I do think you should adjust your own lights for with your own body weight, just as you would adjust your suspension. But have a friend help....unless you want to start a separate post on crashbar tests from a standstill.

Marco

[Marco Prozzo]

Originally Posted by pierce

Interesting, the best LOW beam there is the F650...


IMHO, none of those driving lights are suitable for use with lowbeams in traffic.

I'm curious, what is the 'Integral DE low' used on that F650? is that a Hella DE foglamp ? Or something else?

Yes, that is the integral replacement setup that Touratech markets for the 650. I don't know for sure, but I believe it is a Hella projector low beam, very similar to the DE external Hella though it seemed to throw a beam further than the externa DE foglight on the same bike. I'll check with Nick on that one and get back to you, or you can just check the Touratech site for more info on that setup. They look like two clear bug-eyes.

Marco

[pierce]

It would be fun to try and reproduce your setup, and run additional tests on other lights... I bet we could get a *WHOLE* lotta beemer folks in the SF Bay Area with a wide range of lighting updates lined up for a shootout one dark evening... We could use a few stock R1150GS lowbeams as the calibration/reference point :wink

I wish I still had my old CoolPix 950 digicam that let me lock the ASA and f and shutter speed. my current S300 is fully auto ;-/ (but it has much nicer automation and color/contrast/etc processing than that old nikon). My SLR can be fully manual, but color film printing has SO much lattitude in it, it would be very hard to compare. I could shoot slides, but I have no way of scanning them.

The trick would be finding a local place in the greater SFBA where a few dozen riders could screw around for a half hour on a 1/4 mile stretch of straight line road in a rather dark area (no streetlights or buildings) without having to deal with cages. I suppose we could put spotters at both ends of some country lane with FRS radios to catch the unexpected car ;-/ Maybe even call the sheriffs department of whatever county ahead of time, and explain what we're doing so noone freaks out ?


hmmmmmm. this could be fun.... all sorts of interesting logistics to work out, like keeping straight what each guys lights are.... I suppose we could hand each rider a numbered card, and have him enumerate his lights on the columns of a table, then go thorough each possible combination and check off those lights on a row ... we stack these cards in order

like...

rider #  3 - John Pierce - 1996 BMW R1100RS - 8:35pm

            low     hi      fog               driving          aux
            ===============================================================
            oem    oem      hella microde     n/a              n/a
            90w h4 100w h4  55w h3
test        ---------------------------------------------------------------
----
1	    xx
2                   xx
3                           xx
4           xx              xx
5                   xx      xx

god, this is all too geeky.

[Marco Prozzo]

Originally Posted by pierce

hmmmmmm. this could be fun.... all sorts of interesting logistics to work out, like keeping straight what each guys lights are.... I suppose we could hand each rider a numbered card, and have him enumerate his lights on the columns of a table, then go thorough each possible combination and check off those lights on a row ... we stack these cards in order

like...

rider #  3 - John Pierce - 1996 BMW R1100RS - 8:35pm

            low     hi      fog               driving          aux
            ===============================================================
            oem    oem      hella microde     n/a              n/a
            90w h4 100w h4  55w h3
test        ---------------------------------------------------------------
----
1	    xx
2                   xx
3                           xx
4           xx              xx
5                   xx      xx

god, this is all too geeky.

Just use a "REAL" digital camera that records .wav sound files along with each image. That's how I did it. Bob Dylan wannabe's need not apply - screw the cue-cards man!

Marco

PS If you can do a test like this in thirty minutes with a dozen bikes and multiple light sources, my helmet's off to ya'. Doing the four bikes took us about two + hours between adjusting lights, setting up, doing the pics, and taking down.

[Marco Prozzo]

An addendum regarding the legal issues surrounding the use of HID and Halogen auxiliary lighting: In the April 2004 issue of Rider magazine there is an article on lighting, "Making Light" by Bill Stermer. In that article Stermer writes:

"To be legally sold in the United States, any motor vehicle light must comply with the provisos of the DOT. Lately, there has been some concern about the legality of of xenon HID lights. After some considerable research, phone calls and rooting around in endless government Web sites, I am prepared to say that the DOT has no problem with your adding auxiliary halogen or HID lights to your car or bike. The objection was that some motorists attempted to place xenon HID lighting systems in housings and lenses designed for standard halogen bulbs, or to modify xenon bulbs to fit in these housings."

Along with Stermers advice against adapting Xenon HID lighting to housings/reflectors/lenses not intended for their use, I would again add my original assertion that if you use your auxiliary lights responsibly, dimming them at dusk and nightime for oncoming traffic as you would your high-beam, you should have no problems with the law.....at least not regarding your auxiliary lights.

Marco

[Kaumajet]

Nice work Marco, that must have taken some time. Thanks

One thing I worry about with projector-style HID lamps is that they do an awesome job of lighting the road in front of you. This means the 'ditches', where all of the critters come from, is not only left dark, but your eyes adjust to the bright area in front of the bike.

I let my HID take care of the road, and have my PIAA 520s aimed way off to the sides, for that reason.

This year I'll be adding PIAA 1400 fogs as low-beam supplements, as another problem with HID is that you must turn them down MUCH earlier with oncoming traffic, leaving you a very long distance to travel on low beam only, with your pupils set on 'very bright'.

Just some thoughts...

[chuckh]

Originally Posted by Brad Vardy

...One thing I worry about with projector-style HID lamps is that they do an awesome job of lighting the road in front of you. This means the 'ditches', where all of the critters come from, is not only left dark, but your eyes adjust to the bright area in front of the bike.

Consider an HID based auxiliary light that uses D1S/D1R bulbs/igniter/ballasts that has a reflector design to provide the side to side coverage your looking for Brad.

Sylvania Xenarc X1010 HID auxiliary lights provide broad beam coverage for superb illumination to see those hooved rats on the side of the road. And, they are DOT approved.

I ran these on my GS day/night with oncoming traffic without problems. Just be careful of who you buy them from as there is a bulb shield issue that must be resolved before use for a motorcycle application.

[Kaumajet]

Originally Posted by chuckh

Consider an HID based auxiliary light that uses D1S/D1R bulbs/igniter/ballasts that has a reflector design to provide the side to side coverage your looking for Brad.

Sylvania Xenarc X1010 HID auxiliary lights provide broad beam coverage for superb illumination to see those hooved rats on the side of the road. And, they are DOT approved.

I ran these on my GS day/night with oncoming traffic without problems. Just be careful of who you buy them from as there is a bulb shield issue that must be resolved before use for a motorcycle application.

Thanks for the info Chuck. Do you sell the Sylvania?

I have OEM HID in my Volvo XC70, and they rock. best lights I've ever seen, low or high. Blows my GS with HID and two sets of PIAAs out of the water.

[chuckh]

Originally Posted by Brad Vardy

I have OEM HID in my Volvo XC70, and they rock. best lights I've ever seen, low or high. Blows my GS with HID and two sets of PIAAs out of the water.

Could be that your Volvo OEM HID headlights have a reflector designed for the light bulb instead of an aftermarket HID conversion you have for your GS.

Thanks for the info on multiple light setups on Terra Nova bars, do you manufacture them?