I'll buy vintage incandescent lamps if they're unique, and/or rare...otherwise it's been  LED filament bulbs for daily use simply because they're readily available and cheap to buy and use. LED doesn't do a good job replacing HID, and they don't have personality like discharge lighting.
Why do you think I've stocked up on HID lamps?

Somehow I’m not that concerned about the disappearance of incandescent lamps, especially since I’d rather just use LEDs due to the energy savings. And retrofitting then into most situations is as simple as replacing the bulb.

But I am more concerned about not being able to get his and fluorescent lamps. LEDs can’t replicate the color or behavior of HID.

There are a few.

- 10w T12 halophosphate fluorescent, those really thick short ones.
- Those super long (80w?) T12 tubes.
- The earliest color corrected MV lamps with the cadmium phosphor
- The early medium pressure MV lamps, Siemens Sieray or MAT-V? I forgot the name.
- SON Comfort HPS with better color rendering (already have an SDW-T)
- Mercury free SON, to get the 'clean' spectrum of a high pressure sodium lamp and see how much blue and green the tiny bit of Hg adds to a standard SON.
- "The" Cooper-Hewitt lamp. They scare me to death with their giant bulb of boiling mercury, but are also beautiful pieces of engineering.

If you're in Europe, and have any of these for sale, let me know

Hoarding them for daily use is a bit pointless since the because you often replace a lamp in regular use every year, the hoard will run out in like 10 years or so.

I would "hoard" them for historical reasons and incidental use, not use in completely new lighting designs...

We have dim to warm LEDs here in the living room, they're pretty nice. The only thing i loathe is that they're integrated lamp+armature systems so if the driver pops in like 10 years time, i gotta throw away a perfectly good LED board unless i make my own driver for it.

Reminds of of this article that showed up around this time last year. Interestingly one of the lamps shown is a BT-37 coated 400w MV or MH lamp.

My aimless wandering through random readings once brought me to a scan of a 1978 book on the subject of North American unipart porcelain insulators, and the book thoroughly explains how breakdown resistance was first viewed as a matter of keeping the insulator dry, and early designs reflect that. In fact the now ubiquitous porcelain insulators on 25kV power lines are quite old in design. The underside isn't directly exposed to rain, but contaminants can still accumulate underneath. Those contaminants, when damp, ruin the insulator's properties by literally "shorting" part of the porcelain surface. Then corona discharge or even flashover can occur.

Suspension-type insulators had the same problem... except when used horizontally! Turns out these stay clean thanks to rain, eliminating the dirty, "shorted" sections.

Never thought this would end up on the news. We need to fight for these lamps!

The one type I would still like to get is an ancient arc lamp, especially one of those so-called "metallic flame" arc lamps, which used special metallic electrodes to produce a bluish-white light much like today's daylight fluorescents.

Now such lamps are DC-only, but even the traditional arc lamps made for AC were often designed for 133Hz operation instead of 60, something to be careful about!

A nice compromise would be a homemade contraption that runs well enough. I tried to build one years ago, but the lack of a good idea for a base structure made the project rather overwhelming for the teen that I still was back then. 31 year-old-me however has saved the mechanism from an old CD drive to be used as the core of the lamp! All I need now is a device that can function as a dashpot LOL.

Ahh. Because my two Philips MHN-TD 70W ES: One 730 and one 740, If they don't have problems with hot restrike, tends to restrike after 4-4:30 mins, despite their arctube design.

Hello all.   I’m hoping someone here can help me identify this street light.  I can’t find a manufacturers name on it anywhere.   I also wonder where it might have been used originally.   The globe is glass and appears to be made up of three parts.   The top and bottom are cast iron.   I found it in the Milwaukee Wisconsin area, but Milwaukee is known for its harp street lamps.   I haven’t noticed this type of lamp in Milwaukee.   As you can imagine it is very large and heavy.  Any help would be appreciated thank you.