I recived my plasma ball in the former weekend, and today ( 17.mar.2011) i placed next to my plasma ball, both my Semicom Lexis/Hyundai TEVA helical CFL, which is the main lamp for checking (Which advertised as being based on solid amalgam and without liquid mercury at all) and my Philips Tornado CFL as an indicator for comparision, (Which are truly based on solid amalgam, according to what members told me about Philips energy saving CFLs).
I haven't my camera currently to photograph this check, but i can tell you that both lamps glowed their regular 865 (Philips Tornado) and 827 (Semicom Lexis/Hyundai TEVA) relatively brightly, as like they have liquid mercury in them, instead of glowing their buffer gas color very dimly, indicating of the presence of mercury vapour in them, even when they are cold.
What do you think: Is CFLs that based on solid amalgam instead of liquid mercury, can have mercury vapour present inside the tube, even when cold? Is the Hyundai TEVA and the Philips Tornado CFLs are truly based on solid amalgams?

You can easily find out if a lamp is amalgam or not by listening to it - mercury dosed lamps are silent whereas if you rattle an amalgam lamp, you can hear the solid pellet moving inside it! (NB this does not apply to larger LFL where the amalgam may be on a solid metal strip attached to the electrode mount).  One other way is to measure the run-up time which is sometimes slightly longer for an amalgam lamp, but this depends on the lamp having been switched off for a long time beforehand.

When a lamp is made with amalgam rather than liquid mercury filling, the pellet is heated in the final stages of production to cause the mercury to be released.  Thereafter, the mercury exists in liquid form for a period of many months and will be re-absorbed only relatively slowly into the amalgam pellet.  So unless your amalgam lamp has been shelved for many months, you will not be able to see any difference.

There are some misleading statements floating around at the moment from manufacturers using amalgams to claim that it is safer, by giving the impression that if the lamp breaks, no mercury vapour is released.  They also give the impression that the mercury exists in solid form when the lamp is not burning, and that the mercury is released only when hot, then being re-absorbed again after swtich-off.  This is only partly correct.  A small amount is of course re-absorbed (very slowly) but the majority remains in liquid form for a rather long time.  Referring to the shelf life issue, this really is many, many months.  In case a customer receives a lamp where its mercury dose has been re-absorbed into the pellet they generally complain, because it takes an extremely long time (hours) for the heat generated by the discharge to re-release the mercury, and allow the luminous flux of the lamp to increase to expected levels.

The only real advantage of amalgam over liquid mercury dosing is that the dose of mercury can be more precisely controlled in case of amalgam pellets.

James, i did this experiment because my Hyundai TEVA helical CFL lamp (Which advertised that have solid amalgam and not liquid mercury free), simply have no run-up time at all, and reach full brightness as soon as they are turned on from cold state, and it did this, also in the first turning on, after i bought it (My Philips Tornado [G5 date code] have 1 min run-up and produces half brightness when turned on from cold state).
The Philips PLE-T we had in the past, had a solid amalgam and started out dim pink krypton+argon color every time it was turned on with 1 min run-up, and it wasn't necessary to wait so many time until the next turned on, for the lamp to start out dim pink again (It was like an HID lamps, waiting until it is cooled down, turning on and starting dim pink again).
Also i rattled my Hyundai TEVA CFL and heard nothing, and the same was happened with my Philips Tornado CFL.
Megamen current CFLs, also starts out dim pink every time they are turned on, even if they turned on in a period of several hours after they are turned off.