My wife has a 2008 IS250 with HID bulbs. The car has 80k on it and the headlights have never been replaced. The left low beam is out. It appears to be a really dull purple color, where the one on the right is a much brighter white color. is there a way to test the ballast other than just putting a new bulb in it and see what happens?

If the ballast is bad, is there a site that will have aftermarket ballasts cheaper than OEM?

I was thinking about converting them to LED but have read on here that they dont work well with the oem projectors. Any advice on what to put in? I havent completely ruled out LEDs because my wife very rarely drives at night. I do the night driving in my ES, and we always take my ES when we go out together.

Thanks for any advice

 

Switch bulbs from left to right.

 

Hi mate,

Typically HID bulbs do discolour like that before they are finished. It is most likely the bulb but as per the above post you can rule out the ballast by swapping the bulbs around. From your description I'm quite certain it isn't the ballast.

Just to answer the remainder of your questions:

It is pretty tough to find aftermarket d4s ballasts that will fit nicely for the is250 (I believe there are aftermarket replicas) and even when you do find them it is an absolute mission to replace them (you need to disconnect the igniter and route the cable through the headlight I believe).

Finally id say it's near impossible to find an led that will plug into a d4s igniter socket let alone the d4s bulb slot. So not really an option. You are correct in saying led bulbs just don't perform in projectors.

Best of luck with it.

 

Probably your light bulb. We switched the light bulbs and the result was the same so I knew it was the ballast. As mentioned, it's not easy to get to. You have to remove the bumper, headlight and then fish the head of the new ballast through...there is not a lot of room. All told it took me about 2 hrs start to finish to change ours. I picked up the ballast from Amazon for $49.95 with 6 year warranty. Haven't had an issue since.

 

As others have stated, it's the bulb that's likely bad. The ballasts rarely fail. You can check by swapping bulbs.

Be careful with aftermarket ballasts.

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