The other bulb has been in several days and so far this one has not given any problems. I mailed the defective bulb back to Xenon Link on Monday and was assured they would ship me a new replacement as soon as the defective bulb was received.
Observations:
I rode to school last night which is about a 40 mile round trip on semi-rural roads. Overall impressions were that the headlight "seemed" much brighter, illuminated the road better, and apparently was not to obnoxious because nobody flashed their brights at me.
One thing I noticed is that the headlight on 90% of the other vehicles on the road looked very yellow, my light appeared to be a pure white, and I did notice the assorted "bluish" tint vehicles. 8-)
When switching from low beam to high beam there is no difference in brightness, the only noticeable difference is the beam pattern. This makes sense due to the High-beam only being a different shutter position. On low beam the pattern is pretty much the same as with the H4 bulb but the "notched out" portion in the upper l/h quadrant of the bulb does not have as "crisp" a change from light to no light. The notch is still there but not as crisply defined. The low-beam did not seem to project high intensity light into the car interior when following behind cars in traffic and also the "notch" did appear to do it's job by cutting down on the light cast into the oncoming lane.
I think I will angle the headlight assembly "up" another couple of degrees until I find the spot where I start irritating people and then turn it back down a notch from there.
I am hoping my defective bulb is just a case of infant mortality as all-in-all I am reletively pleased with the results. A nice side note, installation of the kit requires no existing stock wiring to be cut or touched in any way. The HID harness (with fuses and relay) hooks to the battery positive and a chassis ground, you remove your H4 bulb, and then plug a section of the HID harness into the existing headlight bulb socket. The kit gets all of it's juice from the battery via the relay and all the existing wiring does is to supply a signal to the relay to turn on and the high-beam wire is sampled through a diode and is routed to the shutter actuator. Notice the interior of the headlight bucket on the later model R100s. No more fuses, circuit board, and wiring rats-nest!
