# intermedate colored HID question.



## EricB (Mar 13, 2007)

What are those HID bulbs that are like a cross between high pressure sodium and incandescent in color? (Actually closer to incandescent, but it's clearly an oval HID). These are the bulbs used at Virgin Megastores, to give you an example (that yellowish "ambiance" seems to be their image).


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## 2xTrinity (Mar 13, 2007)

Those may be color enhanced High Pressure Sodium -- basically just a standard HPS with extra additives to improve the color rendering (make it look more like incan than typical sodium) in exhange for an efficiency hit. It may even be some sort of hybrid -- like a HPS with a regular incandescent lamp inside the envelope to act as a current limiting resistor, I believe there used to be some mercury vapor lamps sold for household use like that, not sure if any exist for High Pressure Sodium. There are also metal halides that are warmer that I see used in grocery stores to light up produce etc -- those just look white though with a slight "rosy" tint, not at all like incandescent.


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## brickbat (Mar 13, 2007)

Most likely the Philips White Son lamp. It's a HPS lamp, but the pressure is higher than your typical HPS lamp, so the color temp is around 2700K, and the CRI is pretty decent (80+). For an HID, they have a surprisingly 'smooth' spectrum. They are hard to tell from incandescent, at least when new. As they age, they can turn a pinkish-white, though. I think they are around 60 lumens/W. So, not as efficient as HPS, but way better than hot wires...

They are usually 35, 50 or 100W, and they require special ballasts.

I might have a few 50W kicking around for sale. PM me...


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## 2xTrinity (Mar 14, 2007)

brickbat said:


> Most likely the Philips White Son lamp. It's a HPS lamp, but the pressure is higher than your typical HPS lamp, so the color temp is around 2700K, and the CRI is pretty decent (80+). For an HID, they have a surprisingly 'smooth' spectrum. They are hard to tell from incandescent, at least when new. As they age, they can turn a pinkish-white, though. I think they are around 60 lumens/W. So, not as efficient as HPS, but way better than hot wires...
> 
> They are usually 35, 50 or 100W, and they require special ballasts.
> 
> I might have a few 50W kicking around for sale. PM me...


Interesting. It would certainly be much nicer if those were used instead of standard SON lamps in most parking lots, which generally highly overilluminated to begin with -- the loss of efficiency would actually bring the lighting down to a more reasonable level but it would make the whole atmosphere look a lot better. Metal halide is good too from a color perspective, and I like how a lot of businesses are switching to those, but if they are used in fixtures where the bulb is directly visible they are terrible for glare.

Either way though, I don't see these higher end sodium lamps picking up a whole lot of ground with fairly high wattage 2700K CFLs available for much cheaper -- I've been to a couple outdoor shopping centers that use a combination of the "warmer" metal halide (a bit of a reddish tint) in the bigger lights, and what looks like 50W CFLs for smaller lamp posts.


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## EricB (Mar 14, 2007)

2xTrinity said:


> Those may be color enhanced High Pressure Sodium -- basically just a standard HPS with extra additives to improve the color rendering (make it look more like incan than typical sodium) in exhange for an efficiency hit. It may even be some sort of hybrid -- like a HPS with a regular incandescent lamp inside the envelope to act as a current limiting resistor, I believe there used to be some mercury vapor lamps sold for household use like that, not sure if any exist for High Pressure Sodium. There are also metal halides that are warmer that I see used in grocery stores to light up produce etc -- those just look white though with a slight "rosy" tint, not at all like incandescent.



OK, thanks; I wasn't sure if they were a new kind of sodium, or a metal halide, which I wasn't sure of either. I guess the halides are alot like mercury, right? The "pure" white, similar to mercury, but not as bluish? Mercuries can be pinkish as well, unless those were halides as well. (I used to see the pinkish looking ones when I first became interested in mercuries in the 70's. I'm not sure if I remember hearing of "metal halide" back then).
The new high color temperature car headlights are halides, right? Or are some of those mercury? Some are very bluish, and one I saw the other night was outright pink (I compared it to the HPS street lights, and it was similar, but without the yellow). Some appear to change color temperature from an incandescent hue to a mercury hue as the viewing angle changes.

I guess the efficiency reduction would be why this new sodium has not replaced the HPS in street lighting? (I alway hoped they would come out with a more white color that would be more eficient, and replace the "peach" that had become universal on city streets. LED's might be a hope, but they have not caught on yet as street lights). The ones I am talking about seem to be used mostly indoors. Some elevated subway platforms in the Bronx (which were retored to a "retro" look) used them, and it was obviously supposed to be a throwback to the original incandescent lighing. 

Then there are some that do seem to fluctuate between an incandescent look, and HPS, and some being different shades inbetween. I think some of the platform fixtures do have some sort of incandescent backup, for you see the peach HPS color go off, then it is incandescent white. I don't know if both are in the same bulb, though. 
I've seen the hybrid Mercury/incandescent before. They still use the floodlight version of this in many jewelery store windows in the Diamond District. One person once gave me an extra bulb from somewhere, but it was too bright, and when it went off, neither the mercury or incandescent would come back on untill after a cooloff period. So that was not very good four households at all. I didn't know they were even used as such. I thought I was the only one who wanted such a thing, so I could have a mercury in a regular fixture without a ballast. I did perfer having only mercury without the incandescent, though. I'm not sure if there were any other "self-ballasting mercury" bulbs that used some other method besides an incandescent filament. I thought I had heard of one where the ballast was in the base. Now, I don't need that at all, as LED bulbs will be the best substitute. The problem with those is waiting for the price to come down, and the lumens to go up. 

I don't know if there were ever any sodium bulbs with incandescent filaments.


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## benighted (Mar 15, 2007)

I'd like to know where to get hallide bulbs that don't require a ballast. Does such a thing exist?

Edit: I just found some here. $75.99 each. I might try one out when I can afford it.


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## EricB (Apr 13, 2007)

Thanks for the information, and I even went and added the infor about the White SON to the Wikipedia article on Sodium Vapor Lamps, which hadn't even mentioned them.

So this raised another question on this. 

If SOX (the low pressured sodiums) stands for Sodium OXide, then what exactly does SON stand for? I would think it would be "Sodium Nitride", but that is a newly discovered compound from what I see. "Sodium Oxide Nitride" I could not find anything on. "Sodium Nickel" seems to be more involved with batteries, but since the nickel is used to make electrodes, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_battery) then maybe that is what it has to do with?

Does anyone know?


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## brickbat (Apr 13, 2007)

SOX stands for Sodium Oxide? Hmm. That's the first I've heard of that...


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## EricB (Apr 13, 2007)

I got it from the article. Assuming it was accurate, I wanted what SON stood for so I could add it.


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## Chris M. (Apr 14, 2007)

SOX does not stand for Sodium Oxide. It is part of a naming system introduced with the first two-piece low pressure sodium lamps in 1932. Comprising of the arc tube with 
base, and a seperate dewar jacket (kind of like a transparent thermos), necessary to trap/reflect back heat and allow the tube to reach the required high temperature. They were referred to simply as SO (actually SO/H).

In 1955, the simpler one-piece lamp was developed, and was known as SOI. I standing for "Integral" as everything was integrated into a one-piece lamp.
In 1964, to further improve luminous efficiacy and simplify construction, an IR-reflective coating was applied to the outer wall of the lamp to reflect the heat back in. Originally this was pure gold, but given the fact that this absorbed a lot of light, various metal oxide semiconductor films were tried instead. These are the SOX lamps, and are still produced today.

There were also SL and SLI linear sodium lamps (double ended rather than single) once popular for streetlighting but long since discontinued and quite sought after by us lamp collectors.


I do not know what the N in SON refers to, if indeed anything in particular. The arc tubes are a translucent ceramic material, aluminium oxide. Chemical symbol for sodium is Na so maybe that`s a clue?

Information courtesy of http://lamptech.co.uk , a valuable resource for discharge lamp enthusiasts.


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## brickbat (Apr 14, 2007)

EricB said:


> I got it from the article. Assuming it was accurate...



Holy Cow, an error on Wikipedia, how could that be??


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