I decided I would try again to find a decent sidelight bulb. At the same time I'd get the matching fog light bulbs to the headlight ones. This should then fully tidy up the front end, in theory...
First up is the fog lights, this was a simple enough procedure, ordered a set of HB4 55w Ice Blue Xenon Fog Light Bulbs from aceparts.com.
They are just the same as the headlight bulbs but with a different connector. Upon taking out the old ones, I spotted the logo on the back, they were Phillips ones, so quite high quality to start with.
Anyway, on with the comparison of new with old, on the left below are the standard fog light bulbs and on the right the new ice white xenon bulbs.
As you can see, a massive improvement, nice and white like the headlight bulbs. They also make a nice contribution to the amount of light produced, as you can see below, fogs off on the left, fogs on on the right.
The keener eye'd reader will notice the sidelights are already changed for white bulbs in the pictures above, these are actually a set of bulbs I had to return, more on that below.
I then went and ordered some 9 SMD LED tower sidelights, again from aceparts.com. These arrived and seemed promising, certainly should be enough LEDs anyway.
I went and tried one of them, plugged it into the socket but left it out of the headlight casing. When turned on it was very bright, and nice and white. Great, now just to put it back in the casing and all is well, however, the bulbs had other ideas. Due to the amount of LEDs these are quite wide, just wide enough that they won't fit in a E46 headlight casing. So these got repackaged and sent straight back to aceparts.
Next I ordered a set of White Quad LEDs, from aceparts. Once they arrived I went out and tried them, first impressions weren't very good as they didn't hold well in the plugs. I tweaked the metal connectors to be a bit tighter then pressed on. The bulbs lit up quite blue, not the white I was hoping for. They also flagged up the blown bulb error on the dash. Finally, they also caused another odd error, with the sidelights on and the engine off, it caused the indicators in all corners to be permanently on. Needless to say these bulbs also got sent back.
As a last ditch effort I decided to go ahead and order a set of 5 SMD LED tower bulbs off of eBay after a forum member recommended them.
When these arrived they looked very promising, good build quality and quite slender.
Above you can see the new bulbs compared to the 'white' xenon ones. Quite a bit bigger, but thankfully, slender enough to get through the E46 headlight casing hole. Here's how they fit into the plug.
Onto the interesting bit, how they light up. I am pleased to say that they are absolutely spot on, producing a brilliant white light (the blue tint in the photos come from the headlight bulb's blue tinted glass). Below you can see the car with a new bulb on the left and the old 'white' xenon bulb on the right.
Much better I think you will agree. Now, importantly to compare them to the other white xenon headlight and fog light bulbs. First up, a comparison of old vs new next to the headlight bulbs. They are actually a closer match than it looks here.
And finally, the whole set now nice and unified in colour. A fantastic freshen up to the front end in my opinion. The light produced is much easier on the eyes at night too, so all in all worth the effort.
The image below shows the light produced just by the sidelights, although it doesn't look it here, they actually do produce quite a lot of light.
And last but not least, all lights on.
