Attached is the images some Philips F32T8/TL-741s in one of my classes last year, while there was a lot of discussion on the age of the lamps, I wasn't completely sure about the age still. So here is what I know about the lamp:

1) It's date code is probably H0 (1980, 2000, 2020)
2) It is not an Alto
3) It has the ePact symbol
4) It has the Hg symbol
5) The building was retrofitted to F32T8 in the late 1990s (there were tons of 1998 Altos starting to go EOL)

There were several more of them in the same building too including one in the louver next to it with two burnt out 1998 Altos. Also the Polish F32T8 next to the lamp in question burned out after less than like 3 years!

 Soo, does anyone know when it was made? While H0 and it being a F32T8/TL-741 seems like an obvious 2000 lamp, I'm really confused on why it has an Hg symbol... On the second image, you can also see another symbol too out of frame on the first.

August 2010 is the only possibility based on the lamp's features.  I don't know why the letter and number are flipped, but (Hg) and "700 Series" were both added in the mid-2000s.  Prior to that the lamps were branded "Hi-Vision" or "TL 70".  The 700 series lamps were discontinued due to regulations in 2014.

Hm, it's possible I read the code wrong even though I'm pretty sure I didn't. Unfortunately all these lights are dust now.

I didn't know the ePact marking lasted so long though, and I didn't know they made F32T8 non-Altos so late.

The (E) stuck around until 2012.  I'm also surprised to see a non-Alto typical 741 lamp that late.  Usually it was the specialty phosphors that continued to be full-mercury.

Ahh, I remember that now. It's such a shame they're not around anymore.

Also side-note, what is going on with the wiring in the bottom picture, why is the middle socket wired to itself? And the side wire holes also seem to be slightly uncommon.

I wouldn't be surprised if these have old electronic ballasts in them since it was still the first generation of ballasts.

Yeah, those are curious lamp holders.  Are these instant start?  It's probably a non-shunted socket using that wire as a jumper to shunt the contacts.

Yes they are, probably on the older side of instant start too. Yeah I just noticed if you look near the top of that socket there does seem to be another wire wrapped in something going to it, how interesting! The sockets originally tricked me into thinking these used to be F40. The bottom one was starting to get a little old though (and its lamp from 1998 was too), it had a gentle flicker sometimes to it. But these could run a long time flickering for a little bit.

That is very weird. I always thought they had pretty much phased out the non-Alto versions of these non-specialty lamps by the early 2000s. Are you sure it had the Hg symbol? If this was made in 2010, then it must have been a very obscure special order thing. I can’t find a non-Alto F32T8/TL741 in either the 2004 or 2011 catalogs.

Edit: Slim chance, but is it possible this was made for another country? I looked in a couple of Mexico/Central America Philips catalogs from the early 2010s and couldn’t find a non-Alto F32T8/TL741. The fact that it has the E symbol also suggests that it was made for the North American market, but you never know.

Yeah I thought they would have too, but if you look in the top photo you can just barely make out some of it.

Based on the fact it's a school, they probably wouldn't have special lamps so I'm also really confused. Maybe it was like a product they still made but just didn't feel like advertising?

Also the lamp next to it is a TL-741 too that looks newer than 2014 and doesn't look like it has an American etch... These are some odd lamps!

@Emersyn - I see the Hg symbol now. Though to me it almost looks like part of the H0 date code with the image compression making it appear as though there’s a circle around it. It is difficult to make out the smaller details in the current image, do you have a better quality one you could share by chance?

I did a search to see if I could find any other examples of this lamp online, couldn’t find any. Unfortunately, this is probably so rare that it isn’t documented anywhere online. You really have to wonder where this sort of stuff comes from. I don’t think this is the first time I’ve seen a lamp not listed in a company’s catalog (it doesn’t seem as though the catalogs are always all-encompassing, even though they really should be). Granted, I’ve never ordered anything professionally and I don’t entirely know how things work as far as that goes, but I’d think that if a product is not listed in the catalog, no one would know that it is available and thus won’t order it.

Assuming this lamp is some type of a foreign/export lamp, is there really anything stopping it being from 2020? The wear would certainly point more towards it being from 2010, but maybe it’s a really crap quality legacy lamp that was still being made for some random country using old machinery/manufacturing processes (so it still has an old etch even in 2020).

Unfortunately not, I went through my photos and found nothing. Maybe there's a possible the school district wanted a discount so Philips sold off some old stock to them? Or just low quality stock? But I think its definitely from 2010 because the lights were relamped in 2021 with authentic Alto F32T8/TL-741s and GEs.

If it were foreign, I'm not sure if would have an order code. I'm not really familiar with foreign lamps but they don't usually have order codes on them. Plus essentially all new Philips lamps have dark solid etches.

@Emersyn - That’s a possibility. I wonder if they accidentally made a bunch of non-Alto F32T8/TL741s one day in 2010 and just decided to sell them off cheaper because they were incorrect. Maybe they went to some type of a surplus store and were sold off there.

You’re probably right about foreign lamps—they may not have the same order code. There are also just few countries that use F32T8s in general, besides North and Central America.

That’s alright about the photo.

I'm thinking either they were in a surplus store, in storage, or in Philips' storage and they wanted to get rid of them. I think most likely school storage since they leave tons of cases of lamps sitting around even though a few years ago a bunch of Polish Altos were left out next to a staircases for weeks until some people smashed them (during school hours.) I've seen F96T8s in a closet too but they don't relamp F96T8s anymore.

From what I've seen at school, I wouldn't even be that surprised seeing foreign market lamps!

@everyone - Are manufacturers known to have excess lamps leftover in their stock for years on end that are just waiting to be completed/shipped out? I’m starting to wonder if it’s possible that Philips had some of these lamps (possibly unetched) manufactured in the 90s or early 2000s lying around in 2010, so they just decided to etch them all real quick and sell them as a special order thing just to get rid of them. I  apologize if that theory sounds ridiculously far-fetched, but I really can’t think of another reason besides that, the mistake theory, and the foreign market theory, that these lamps would have ended up with that etch, date code, color, and being non-Alto. Unless Philips really was just making these under the hood in the late 2000s/early 2010 without so much as including them in a catalog. We may never know what the context is for this lamp.