Before I joined lighting gallery, I used to find lamps, ballasts, and fixtures from countries outside my home country to be very boring because of knowing the fact that such lighting equipment would not reliably work on my country’s standard 120v 60hz mains supply. After learning that some fluorescent and HID lamps are electrically interchangeable throughout the world, I started to have a better appreciation for foreign lamps, ballasts, and fixtures. Does anyone else find lamps, ballasts, and fixtures from outside their home countries boring and uninteresting?

Not boring, but sometimes confusing. The U-bend fluorescent tubes are just baffling to me. And there is also the strange lamp placement in your incandescent RR crossing signal lights 

I don't find anything completely boring, except for LED. I actually find US ballasts and lamps quite interesting, just because they're different.

I'm not all that interested in actual fixtures though, I'm more interested in the technical details of the lamps themselves. To me, a fixture is just a means of getting the light from the lamp where it's needed, and as I don't have any streets to light, they don't really do that much for me.

I do like the Thorn Beta 5 and Gamma 6 lanterns though, which is why we have some in use here     

I find US mercury lamps interesting, mainly because they were so much better built than our European ones!
Although use in street lighting for decades here as well, unfortunately the mercury lamps here had the worst lumen depreciation than any other form of HID lamp!, (even from the best manufacturers of the day), dropping down to 80% of their lumens within the first 2 years!

You hear on LG though, of the clear US ones of names like Westinghouse that would run for 20+ years!
I know very little of US MV lamps, but I wonder what lumens a Westinghouse lamp would actually still be putting out after the standard 5 year street lighting cycle, and if still good, what was Westinghouse’s manufacturing secret?

While I certainly feel like that's a bit of a harsh way of putting it, I must say I do have a certain liking for how most American street lighting fixtures were styled. I just like the cobrahead, teardrop/gumball, shoebox, NEMA, and other common designs we had compared to the rest of the world where it seems like most of their streetlights looked like food containers mounted to ballast boxes.  It does make me a bit sad to see this all go away for LED fixtures which certainly don't seem to have much, if any thought put into aesthetics though.

Food containers lol. I do like some foreign street lights. Like Sylvania Roadster, Thorn Beta 5 and Gamma 6.

Yeah, there's just something unique about the styling of cobraheads that can't be beat. Especially the older 1960s era cobraheads. There are some foreign streetlights are pretty neat looking too.

The 175w mercury lamps from the 1970s seem to last forever. I know of some 175w Sylvania lamps that had been doing daily service since the 70s and are still putting out a decent amount of light, definitely not a 80% drop. Maybe a 50% drop compared to a new lamp.

Yeah a lot of LED roadway and outdoor lights (especially the older models) seem to be pretty uninspiring to me, just rectangles or shovels with a driver compartment strapped to it. I encountered a few that are better styled but that seems to be the exception. It's probably a pipe dream but a properly built LED reproduction cobrahead would be pretty cool too. Like the LED teardrops but in a cobraheads form factor. Who knows maybe if 1950s and 1960s styling becomes trendy again maybe someone will make a LED cobrahead styled after the 1960s models.     

 

I find all the modern electronically ballasted, instant start fluorescent lights boring. No flickering tubes, glowing starters or humming ballasts on start-up. Even fogerin made magnetically ballasted fixtures don't appeal to me although I do have one for testing tubes. 

I know a lot of people will disagree with me, but I just find most street light fixtures uninteresting. I won't say boring, because they have a function to perform, and how they do that is never boring. But I don't particularly care much for the design of most, and sorry cobrahead fans, those are the worst for me (waits for the slaps  )

Deff not boring, if anything the opposite of boring.. which I'll just say is interesting.