Convert D3S to D2S?

[afstud]

you are correct on all of that but its more a pain than its worth... the d3s is held in place by the base of the bulb which is the silver box / igniter piece why do you want to go through all of the trouble anyways?

[jschrauwen]

you are correct on all of that but its more a pain than its worth... the d3s is held in place by the base of the bulb which is the silver box / igniter piece why do you want to go through all of the trouble anyways?

I live well into the countryside. Less then 10% of my driving is within any illuminated city or town at night. So, predominantly, 90% of my night time driving is in the country or on an un-illuminated highway. I prefer to have as best possible lighting from whatever car I own. To those ends, I looked to the options available for my Audi's bixenon D3S AFS headlights. The only viable option initially was to use either one of the higher end Philips or Osram D3S bulbs. However, it seems that those that have made those changes to those bulbs saw little to no appreciable improvement in lumen output. It seemed that most were actually interested in the esthetics value those bulbs provided. At just under $200 for a set of those designer bulbs, I thought I'd look to other options. And I found some.
The D3S and D1S are actually the same type of bulb set-up with the exception that the D3S uses a more environmentally friendly gas then the D1S. And that the D1S uses 85V whereas the D3S uses 43Vfrom their respective ballasts. What they also have in common is that their bulb/igniter is a one piece unit and cannot be separated. And their square bases both use the same 4 pin MQS connector from the ballast. The D2S bulb does come separately from it's iginiter and they are easier and cheaper to find/buy.

There's now an adapter available that's the same shape/size of the D1S/D3S igniter. It's designed to take a D2S bulb. This adapter lends itself to being powered by a higher wattage D2S ballast. There's a 50W D2S ballast available that delivers a true 50W at 85V. There's also a true 50W D2S 4200k bulb available that will produce 5300 lumens as opposed to the oem 35W 4200k with 2800-3200 lumen. Now that's what I call performance in usable lighting output and something I've been looking for.