Personally, I would say the E46 projectors should only be used with Halogen bulbs.

Having run them with a 5000k HID kit, the eye strain on an unlit country road was very noticeable. But dropping down to H7 Halogen bulbs, the eye strain is gone, but you still get very good headlights.

Also, the blue haze around the cut-off was very intense with HID, whereas with Halogen it is still there but nowhere near as intense. I actually think it's great that the cut off is so sharp with the E46 clear lenses, because you can instantly see where the beam height stops.

It's been mentioned before, but brighter headlights does not always mean better visibility, it's more so how that light is distributed onto the road. For example, with a HID kit, I was constantly having to put my main beams on along country lanes at night because my eyes couldn't adjust to the intense difference above/below the cut off... whereas now I'm only running halogens I can drive country lanes at night, in the rain, without needing to use main beams.

ref haze - did you find the haze too intense with perfectly adjusted shutter or you never tried to do so? Just wondering as some people complain about rainbow effect not knowig it can be reduced by shutter adjustment.

Agreed with the eye strain issue of light-dark border, took me a while to get
used to it years ago, also thats the reason most of new cars uses gradual cutoff not sharp one, but to me its still better to use HIDs. I tried halogen bulbs back when I had h7 retrofitted projectors and didnt like it. I guess its personal pref.

Never tried to adjust it to be honest, it feels like one of those things that if I start adjusting it would drive me insane until I had it perfect!

That is exactly how you described it ! :D with my OCD, it took me a while to nail it, but once you do - it DOES make a difference.
see below:
left side - adjusted as good as possible after a trial of tears (D2S OEM bulbs)
right side - adjusted OK but not perfect, ( H7 chinese burners)

https://www.volvoforums.org.uk/attac...1&d=1578674900

shutter adjustmed do make a huge difference. Best part is, you can actually decide on the distance where you want sharp focal point - for example, you can set shutter so cutoff point is perfectly clear 10m in front of your car (like pic on the shed) but the further the distance, it will blur out a bit. Or you can do a full sharp cutoff on the point where beam hits the road but it will be blurry when projected on the back of the car 5 meters in front of you .

I did try to adjust mine but this was the least amount of blue I could get out of them, unfortunately.

I have now wired the high beams on the Camaro ones but I still can't say what the shape of the high beam is. I think there's no secondary shield behind the low beam one and it just fully opens, resulting in an indiscernible pattern, especially when combined with the HB3 high beams coming on at the same time.

Thanks
Looks more like star-shape, defo less uniformed than my straight-cut octagonal shape (see pic), so your high beam may be also more focused (good thing). How do you find it when driving at pitch black, makes a big difference or hb3 still provides main source?

https://www.volvoforums.org.uk/attac...1&d=1578914096

Out of interest.
Do camaro ones fit 1:1 without modifications? Sizing and hole fitment?
You retrofitted them to prefacelift or facelift?

They do look quite a lot wider, but not sure if it is because of projector cup design or the lens beeing milky/dotted?
You can see, the light output is tiny bit weaker, but decent amount wider.

Using foglights with leds will widen view of field quite a lot.
But the foglights will blind oncoming traffic, although they are aimed to hit floor (even those cheap chinese leds are quite strong). Useless in high intensity traffic, at least without modding.

"2) No colour flicker at the cutoff: a plus in my eyes, as I found it distracting;"
Seems to be issue with hids (hid or bulb spedific), because with leds the cutoff seems quite uniform.

----

These pictures are without foglights. Some photos taken with nightmode.
Although a bit narrow, they are super strong.

http://www.jipikaje.ee/volvo/examples.jpg

I can't really tell which one ends up being the main source of light. I have mostly been driving around town these past few weeks so I couldn't really test it out. I'll post up some pics after I've had a chance to properly test them out.

This is how it looks on a wall:
https://imgur.com/a/IH3TjxA


Yes, they are 1:1 fit. They also have a perfect rotational alignment. Mine's a pre-facelift model. As far as I'm aware, bowl shape is the main determinant of the beam shape. Lens plays a minor role as well but it's less important.

Are these H7 RHD ones from theretrofitlab? Your beam step-up shape is a little different to the ones I had ( "_-" vs "_/"). Who knows, perhaps they've also made some adjustments to the lens itself, as yours look to have no flicker at all.

As for the width and intensity comparison between the replicas and the originals, both the intensity and the width were greatly improved, as I didn't just change the projectors but also went from Chinese H7-base bulbs to high end D2S Osrams. The pictures just don't do them justice due to automatic contrast/brightness adjustment on the phone's camera.

Ok, so I've finally gotten a chance to take some pics in pitch black. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a spot with no trees around (I could have just turned the car sideways I guess, but it didn't come to me at the time).

To me it almost appears like the HB3s are pointing too far down, as I get most of the yellow output at about the spot where the visible light from the low beam ends. After wording it this way, I guess they're aimed well for a non-bi-xenon setting but could be more beneficial if they were aimed a bit higher here.

The width shots were made with low beams only.

https://imgur.com/a/BMKGJvu