My 2007 Prius (not touring) halogen headlight issue

My 2007 Prius (non touring) has a weird headlight issue. This car has halogen headlights. When I first start the car in the morning I turn on the headlights and after 1/2 second, they get significantly dimmer. If I turn them off, then back on, it doesn't do this, the lights are just dim. Not so dim I'm worried that there's a bad ground, but I can't get it to repeat the problem again until the next morning. Overall, the headlights are among the poorest-performing of any car I've owned. As an experiment, I drove 30 miles to work in the dark both ways with high beams on with NOT ONE person flashing me to turn back to low beams. I was wondering what could possibly cause this strange consistent dimming issue when the lights are tuned on. Any ideas? These are definitely NOT HID lights btw, and plastic lenses are in pretty good shape, not fogged over. Thanks!

 

I/m wondering if there is a Daytime Running Light module in this car I don't know about and perhaps a daylight sensor is telling the lights that its daytime. Far as I can tell, there isn't supposed to be DRL in my model of prius, and TechStream doesn't seem to be helping me troubleshoot this

 

That's kind of what I thought. But as an electrician, I'm trying to figure out why the lights go dimmer a second after turning them on, but doesn't repeat after turning them back off and on again. Well, I guess I'll buy some new bulbs. I really need better performing headlights! Any suggestions for proven-to-work LED replacement headlight and foglight bulbs? I don't want to blind everyone, but I need at least modern performance

 

No, they're the bulbs that came with it when I bought it used a year ago. I should just buy some new ones and see if it helps!

 

HMMMM!!!! Its looking more like I may have misidentified my headlights... Yesterday while checking motor oil, I saw stickers on top of my headlight housings under the hood, which says WARNING HIGH VOLTAGE! And doing a bit more searching on PC, the headlights dimming a second after turning them on is consistent with HID lights... UGH! Those apparently have a bad reputation. I guess I need to dig a bit deeper on this. One post on this forum says if the car has foglights, that is also an indicator that the car probably has HID headlights. But there seems to be conflicting info on that too. From what I can tell from the VIN, my car is a Package 6 standard model, but one place online said my car had the Touring package based on certain options my car has, even though I have the smaller spoiler and 15 inch rims. Gotta love the Internet! "I read it on the Internet so it MUST be true!" Anyway, is there any adjustments or wiring upgrades I can do to increase headlight brightness? I'm an electrician, and jack of all trades, so I'm open to about anything to improve the dismal headlight performance!