Ceramic Halide is an interesting one, I remember when I first saw it in use in a shop window, (about 1996), I was blindsided!, I didn’t even know what it was??, it never crossed my mind that it could be halide in a PCA tube at the time!

When I eventually found out, and had actually bought some, I had a ‘wow’ moment, (bare in mind this was still some years until I had the internet, and could learn about them on Lamptech), and I thought to myself, “these will change the whole concept of lighting”?
And sure enough I started to see them everywhere popping up over the coming years, predominantly as spot and track lighting in Virgin Mega Stores, Asda super market’s and jewellers window displays in shopping centres all over the UK

However, fast forward to last weekend, and while out at the Trafford Centre, (shopping mall), Christmas shopping, while my wife Jo was doing the shop, I was nosying at all the mall lighting, I counted just one shop still using CMH lamps in their spot/track lighting, the other 99% are all now super powerful semiconductor’s doing exactly the same job, ( high intensity point source lighting ),  but using a lot less energy.

This again makes me believe there will be no HID lamps being manufactured by 2025!, luckily I have many ceramic halide lamps in my collection if this was indeed the case?

My lighting interest started with 5mm and 3mm LED's. Then went on to my first HID which was a mercury bucket (still have it) so I have a fondness for all of these technologies. I wouldn't say I miss HID because it is by no means extinct in my neck of the woods. But will I if/when it all gets scrapped and abandoned. Yeah. When I'm old will I wave a Cain around and b**** about the glary crappy plastic lights and ramble about the world before. Probably. will I still collect said shitty plastic lights and maybe even grow a liking of them for certain applications. Most likely. I use LED's, just not everywhere. And never will use them everywhere. Will I have a decent amount of bulbs to feed my fixtures til I croak. Hopefully. I'm pretty well on my way already.

When I first started to properly research discharge lighting, late 80s early 90s, it helped to actually own them as you say, I’d sit there for hours looking through two sets of sun glasses at mercury lamps starting and running up, it was so interesting to me, and I would go out and try to buy every book on the subject of discharge lamps to consume as much knowledge as I could.

Now I’m in the exact same place today with lighting, but my interest now is on the P N junction and how energy is converted into light, (something I still don’t fully understand), I think this is why LED is as fascinating to me now as arc tubes were back then? 

Well, at the end of the day, it's up to each of us what we use at home and in our collections. For us, the primary reason for not liking L*D is the simple matter of a total lack of choice. We cannot buy anything else in retail stores, the only place to get incandescents or discharge lamps is eBay or the occasional wholesaler who still has stock. When they run out, as they surely will, that will be IT.

Street lighting, now that is another matter. Here again, it is total lack of choice. The 'powers that be', whoever they are, have decided that all street lights will be white L*D. End of. No discussion, no consultations with residents, nothing. They just come and replace perfectly good discharge lamps with L*D and they do it in the middle of the night; the HPS post tops outside our windows were working perfectly well one night when I went to bed at midnight. Then when I woke up at 6am for a pee, they had gone and been replaced with monstrosities so ugly we can't bear to look at them and have had to fit a blind to the kitchen window.

So yes, HID (and LPS, which strictly speaking isn't HID but I'll include it for completeness) is missed intensely here. Fortunately, we are not (yet, anyway) subject to government whims in our own home, so can run what we like. If you want to run over-excited semiconductors, go right ahead, but please, don't expect us to like them.

Yeah I do feel sorry for you on that point Ria, I’m very surprised Aberdeen doesn’t have tungsten lamps somewhere in your local area?
I could wander down to our local Jacks, (formally Tesco), in town and pick up halogen lamps off the shelf!, ironically Jacks don’t even sell LED!, now how good these halogen lamps are is anyone’s guess?, but if their anything like the Poundland ones that barely last 3weeks like the ones Jo’s sister uses, they wouldn’t be worth it!

But the fact is their there for people to choose if you want them, it must be really depressing when you don’t have that choice as you say where you are?

Well I dare say some small shops somewhere might have old stock, but we don't have time to wander round every single place looking. Anyway, as I said we have enough stock here to last us for what we need for a good few years, so that's not the main grumble.

Which simply put, is street lighting. We can't go out at night now, the quality of illumination, especially in the side streets, since the HID lamps were replaced is awful, big patches of dark everywhere, especially on the pavements. We just don't feel safe 

Incidentally, you mention eBay, do you ever order lamps from INTERNATIONAL LAMPS?, they have a range of halogen for reasonable prices

I think I might have done, not sure. We have plenty of them anyway, I made sure to stock up on incandescent, halogen and even a few CFL's, so we have enough to see us for a good few years, I think. We mainly have our Gamma 6 on in the living room though, she gives a lovely light 

At least with SOX, you’ll get that nice orange ‘fireglow’ effect for these cold winter days/nights

That's one of the reasons we like it. 
I'm especially fond of SOX, as it was correctly identifying a SOX fixture that really sparked my interest in lighting. 

Well I dare say some small shops somewhere might have old stock, but we don't have time to wander round every single place looking. Anyway, as I said we have enough stock here to last us for what we need for a good few years, so that's not the main grumble.

Which simply put, is street lighting. We can't go out at night now, the quality of illumination, especially in the side streets, since the HID lamps were replaced is awful, big patches of dark everywhere, especially on the pavements. We just don't feel safe 

Adding to what Ria said, I for one cannot see clearly under the current crop of street lights. My eyes just don't cope with the colour temperature. 

Well, at the end of the day, it's up to each of us what we use at home and in our collections. For us, the primary reason for not liking L*D is the simple matter of a total lack of choice. We cannot buy anything else in retail stores, the only place to get incandescents or discharge lamps is eBay or the occasional wholesaler who still has stock. When they run out, as they surely will, that will be IT.

Street lighting, now that is another matter. Here again, it is total lack of choice. The 'powers that be', whoever they are, have decided that all street lights will be white L*D. End of. No discussion, no consultations with residents, nothing. They just come and replace perfectly good discharge lamps with L*D and they do it in the middle of the night; the HPS post tops outside our windows were working perfectly well one night when I went to bed at midnight. Then when I woke up at 6am for a pee, they had gone and been replaced with monstrosities so ugly we can't bear to look at them and have had to fit a blind to the kitchen window.

So yes, HID (and LPS, which strictly speaking isn't HID but I'll include it for completeness) is missed intensely here. Fortunately, we are not (yet, anyway) subject to government whims in our own home, so can run what we like. If you want to run over-excited semiconductors, go right ahead, but please, don't expect us to like them.

I get what you say about leds, i would be fine with them if us consumers got a choise of lamps. Regulations have slowly chocked out our prefred lighting options, and in California they have laws that state you can only use a gu24 socket in new constructions or renovations to pass inspection, and that only lets you use led and cfl lamps.  I just want to buy the bulbs i want, why can't i do that?

Yep, I miss HID.    Growing up in the age of mercury vapor, I was quite used to all the color options it had. From clear, to high output white, to color corrected, to deluxe. Then HPS came along and everything became orange.    At first, I didn't know what to think of HPS...it eventually became a love-hate relationship. Then I discovered MH around age 14, and even though I wouldn't get my hands on a MH lamp until I was 17, I thought that they were a good compromise for white light, higher efficacy than MV, and significantly better color rendering than HPS. Fast forward to the 2000's and the arrival of CMH. This is a technology that unfortunately was a little to late to the scene, and didn't really catch on like it should have. I really think that it would've eventually made significant inroads replacing HPS and QMH, if LED hadn't taken off. (If someone had asked me 15 years ago if I thought that another technology like LED/SSL would replace all HID, I would've laughed.  )

Yeah I remember in the late 2000s over here, CMH was really starting to take off for indoor HID such as recessed downlighting and flood/spot lighting. At the time I thought LED still had a way to go and the next major streetlighting technology would be electronically ballasted CMH. The other competing technologies for streetlighting at the time seemed to be either induction, quartz PSMH, or electronic HPS. I figured CMH would offer a good balance between lamp life, efficacy, and CRI over technologies such as HPS. Then by late 2010, 2011 municipalities here started testing LED luminaires and they pretty much took off over the past 10 years. At the time though, I was a bit torn with LED replacing HPS, since I never saw mass MV installs, the white light from the LED luminaires were a bit of fresh air compared to the orange of the HPS that I've known for years. But now as HPS becomes rarer, I've kind of taken a liking to them over the LED lights. My area still has a good number of mass HPS and MH installs for streetlighting so I still see HID streetlights but once those go away I'll probably miss them.

I think the only mass PSMH and CMH streetlighting installs I've seen are in Toronto. The gumballs are all PSMH and in 2015 I even saw some new dedicated CMH luminaires go up.

Interestingly I know a town that refitted to induction streetlighting (Cobourg, ON) around 2008/2009, just before the LEDs took off.

Induction never took off here, come to think of it, where I am, fluorescent never did either! The nearest induction installation I know of is on an ASDA car park in Manchester 40 odd mile away from me!
Halide street lighting didn’t take off either, (not even the ceramic version), even today the only halide street lighting I know of is around the shopping centre in my neighbouring town, and it’s 8 columns if that?

I was born in 1972 with predominantly mercury street lighting, then in 1980 the mass changeover to LPS came about with the energy crisis.
The LPS lamp was with us for the next 36 years, with spot replacement of HPS only appearing in the 90s here!
In about 2015, just 3 LED lanterns appeared in random places across our whole town, these would remain as 3 until
2017 when there was a complete town wide explosion of them wholesale!

The 5 guys that did the refit, (2 in a column truck, 2 in a bucket van, and one in a service van), worked at such an incredible speed, that when I passed them while going to get milk and bread one morning, I saw them starting one road, and by the time I got back from the shop they had completed the removal of about 6 old concrete columns, planted the new steel ones, fitted lanterns to them and had them lit on test!!

It took the same team just 3 months to completely 100% re-light our entire town from SOX to LED!