eBay lights are indeed crap. At least as delivered.
I bought a set specifically to tear apart for the clear lenses. So I searched out the ones with the lowest price, although they're all the same chunks of plastic from the same manufacturer. "solar" or something like that...
They were projector lenses in the low beams and standard reflector high beams.
All the eBay lights that are projectors are halogen projectors. Meaning; hid bulbs in them are crap. The focal lengths are all wrong, by that I mean
completely wrong.
Compounding this is that if you use the halogen bulbs the light output is still crap. The lenses are thin and the optics are extremely poor (hence: cheap price). You can tell that someone just cast a piece of glass that looks like a projector lens rather than making one that actually IS a projector lens. Chuck on top of that the focal lengths of the housings are all wrong for even halogen use.
I hacked them right out of the housing and installed a set of Acura TSX projector housings with D2S capsules.
The reflector high beams are nearly useless with either halogen bulbs or capsules. I threw some cheap conversion capsules in them and they don't even reach 1/4 as far as my low beams. Useless. I mainly use the high beams to catch the reflectors on road signs above the projectors low beam cutoff, because pointless for anything else.
The base for the lights (part that bolts to the radiator support panel) is very thin and poorly reinforced. This lets the lights "flop around" and vibrate constantly. I tossed the bases in the crapper and used the much thicker OEM bases on the original lights.
The frame around the light housings is also crap. Very thin and poorly braced. They also allow the lights to flop and bobble around. A lot of it is where the 2 long bolts that hold the headlight frame to the base is waaay over-sized to keep everything properly aligned. I wrapped the bolts in some cellophane, threaded them into the frame and filled the void with JB weld. Not a stitch of wobble now. You have to make sure you have the parts properly aligned though or the headlights won't fit the grill properly.
The adjusters are also total crap. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, sometimes they strip or sometimes they just move around however/whenever they feel like it. I ripped all the cheap "Ching Ching" pieces off and installed the adjusters from the OEM housings. Much better.
I also built my own wiring harness complete with relays and a "4Hi" arrangement, Although I did it a little differently. 12 and 10 gauge wiring plus associated connectors and I did away with the OEM wires (too long, too undersized and too old) by tapping the headlight signal directly from the switch and a main relay under the hood to eliminate the high power draw going through both the dash switch and the tiny contacts in the multifunction switch. The 40A relay for the lows is feed directly from the battery as is the highs. It all looks like so:
You must be registered for see images attach
The black relays are the headlight relays. The 60A megafuse feeds them. There's a bit more going on there but that's the stuff for the lights....
You want to do the 4HI wiring for the reasons "sewlow" mentioned, not because it "looks cool". When you go from high to low and back again, you will have a few seconds of no light at all while the capsules warm up. Problem is the bulbs turning off snap off immediately and then you've got a 2-5 second delay while the capsules coming on get up to full intensity. The first 2 secs are totally black. At highway speeds, that's half a football field before you have light again....not good.
As mentioned, i bought the eBay lights mainly to get the clear lenses. Using HID's in stock fluted lenses is just a waste as he fluted lenses are
designed to diffuse the beam instead of letting it all travel forward. Not what you want with HIDs, it just leads to glare and even shorter projection at night...
So, after all was said and done I had about 4 packages of JB quick, a set of TSX projectors and associated ballasts/wiring/capsules, and a bit of wiring upgrade into it.
But, I also have low beams that reach further and wider than any HID conversion or stock bulb could every dream about, no flicker or color shift and lights that fit to the OEM grill openings as good as (or better) than the stockers......