Over the last few years ive noticed a downward trend of quality on Venture's standard (probe start) MH lamps. Venture has always boasted about being on the forefront of metal halide technology and quality/performance. These last few batches of Venture standard 400w (M59) lamps have sucked, maybe its just me, but I likened them to the same performance values one would typically see with Plusrite. Poor lamp to lamp color uniformity, far too long of a burn in period (before lamp stabilizes in color), and short life. I understand theyre trying to push the Uni-form pulse start, but I would expect EVERY product they offer to be held to the same quality standards. Ide even go so far as to say Plusrite possibly being slightly better

Dont know if it is related, but their HPS lamps over here (European standard) are not all the best either. A council in a place where i worked replaced all ligthing on the roads in 2012, with brand new luminaires with 250W HPS. 2 years later some 1/5th of them were cycling

Venture HPS lamps are non-existent here, at least ive never seen one, they must only make HPS and Mercury for the European market. I can however get Venture HPS ballasts in CWA 250w, 400w, and 1Kw...but thats it.

There is an indoor hockey arena close by here that installed the Venture 1000w "White-Lux" 5000K lamps and it looked really good, the lamps all burned about the same daylight color and apparently held that color well throughout life.
But that was nearly 10 years ago now, and for whatever reason they have since relamped back to standard 4000K

I personally think Venture is slowly giving up on MH like most other brands due to LED, I didnt know Venture had a whole new LED division until just recently.

I own a few Venture 40w MV lamps but they are older. Venture ballasts for probe start MH that I ordered from my supplier seem to work just fine for me also but they are usually already a couple years old when I buy them new