So you've just had a headlight blow out, and you want to replace it with something a little bit brighter to help your vision at night while driving. There are a few options out there ranging from easy as pie to taking some time and expertise to install.
More than likely you have an incandescent bulb headlight in your car right now. The incandescent bulb as been around for over a century. It is essentially the same type of bulb that you would find in your lamp at home, just with a thicker filament installed. These headlights themselves do emit plenty of light for practical driving applications for today's roads but they are brighter.
Halogen bulbs are one step brighter than your average incandescent bulb. These bulbs are almost identical to an incandescent bulb except that they have thinner filaments and are filled with halogen gas inside the filament capsule. This halogen gas actually helps redeposit the tungsten that is burning off of the filament back onto the filament instead of depositing it on the walls (as in a conventional incandescent bulb).
The brightest replacement lights you can put on your vehicle are xenon headlights, which use a mixture of different gas to produce different light colors (varying gases burn at different temperatures, emitting different colors). H.I.D. or High Intensity Discharge are the most advanced and most efficient xenon technology available. H.I.D. headlights work by having an electric charge ignite and arc between two electrodes in a xenon gas-charged sealed system. H.I.D. provide a very bright light and also draw very little power from your car's battery, but they do need to have a ballast installed on your vehicle in order to keep a continuous and steady electrical current flowing into the xenon gas chamber.
