@Laurens

Not sure about Netherlands, but for me 80's buildings are associated mostly with ~3600K ЛБ 'office' white halo tubes, sometimes in the mix with some 6500K ЛД daylights. No WW halos here at all. Dusty, flickering preheats, with some stuck starters, you spot on.

By the way, there are two distinctive types of 90CRI fluorescents, with rather different spectrums. Older ones used multi-mixes of wideband phosphors, evenly covering the whole spectrum from blue to deep red with some gap in the middle around of mercury own green/yellow lines. Balanced but a bit boring light. Also notably inefficient. And short living with fast lumen deprecation. New rare earth based ones are a bit of cheat, as they are not true continuous spectrum lamps actually, 930's are more of 4000K rare earth with some gaps in green-blue and red plugged with extra phosphors. Yes, CRI calculation algorithm rates them about 90, and they too render the things slightly oversaturated because of their still spiky spectrum, like usual CRI80 rare earth types. Made more for visual comfort than true-to-life color rendering.

RRK, the selection of standard halophosphate tubes in your home country also reminds me of Japan’s selection for low CRI halophosphate fluorescent lighting as well since the lowest CCT for most of their standard halophosphate tubes is 3500K, but they oddly refer to their 3500K standard halophosphate tubes as ‘WW’ and their 4200K halophosphate cool white tubes as ‘W’. However, 3000K CCT fluorescent lamps in the Japanese market are often found as triphosphor tubes in most cases and are usually identified as ‘EX-L’.

No wonder. I think it was rather quickly discovered with the first fluorescents back in 1940s that any attempts to make low color temperature fluorescent do not yield a good quality lamp. It was somewhat solved in 1980's with rare earth, but while 2700-3000K lamps were much better than halo version, the light quality left still much to be desired.

Truth to be told, only high-cri 3000K LEDs started to able to compete with incandescents for light quality. Even most of 3K metal halides were not the best honestly.

for me 80's buildings are associated mostly with ~3600K ЛБ 'office' white halo tubes

...which were not even specified for that application, rather for industrial lighting. I know the sight, some class-rooms in "my" school had them as well.

Otherwise the typical GDR building had a mixture of 3000 and 4000 K, too often in one and the same room.

Dusty, flickering preheats, with some stuck starters, you spot on.

...buzzing ballasts, dying lamps in closets and other damned places left blinking forever...


I saw a Narva booklet with almost desperate language, describing the use of "Warmton de luxe"*) in rooms that demand a cosy atmosphere as "necessary" and calling the compromised efficacy "justifiable", emphasizing that it was still much better than incandescent lamps. So it's not as if good products and advise from the manufacturer were not available. It was just carelessness. Far beyond the (ab)use of lighting equipment of course.

*) This should perhaps be pointed out as well: Halophosphate not necessarily meant poor light without any red. The improved variants, with designators like "de luxe" or "Ц", were really different.

* Oh absolutely, i really like the light from my Deluxe warm white Tungsram tube. It's a very nice creamy color, every bit as cozy as incandescent, but still with its own character. I like it better than my 930 trisphosphor tube. I wish i could have more deluxe tubes, so i don't have to avoid running the tube because i don't wanna wear it out...

The efficiency difference with modern phosphor compositions is significant though. But that doesn't matter if you're heating your house electrically, or if you have extremely cheap electricity like in most of northern america.

Warm White fluorescent lamps have their place, but they need to be the right brightness, in combination of the correct color tones of the environment they are lighting.  In many of the church buildings I maintain the lighting in, the wall and carpet and other fabric colors are colors which do not reflect the 3000K light very well and as a result, things seem very dark and those who are up there in years often complain that it is too dark and they they need things brighter.  That's where the 3500K comes in handy, and in 90% of my buildings, 3500K works great, with 5% needing 4000K to really work well.  Again, environmental color tone has a lot to do with it. 

Surrounding environment color tones actually has quite big impact. Few years ago I renovated my apartment completely inside. Previously the floor was light colored wood imitation while most of the walls were in warm pastel colors. With these the 4000K or 6500K worked nicely as 3000K or even 3500K felt bit too suffocating. Now the floor is light grey and walls are olive green and with these the 6500K or even 4000K feels quite cold and IMO 3500 or 3000K feels way more comfortable.