We were cleaning our fluorescent ceiling fixtures recently and I saw the brands of the lamps since the diffusers were removed. Two of them are the Philips Alto lamps with the green caps which I see everywhere. The other have GE "Ecolux with Starcoat" lamps with green colored etches. I thought Starcoat was interesting trademark, but I've never heard of it. Do anyone know what it does?
These are all the thin electronic ballast tubes also.
Starcoat first appeared during the early 90s as an improved coating intended for GE's new line of T8 lamps.
Starcoat had a much better color rendering than the usual cool white and warm white tubes that were currently available.
Starcoat was even better than the deluxe versions of these colors.
All Starcoat tubes have a very high CRI rating and suffer no lumen loss like some of the deluxe lamps.
In fact Starcoat tubes have even higher lumen ratings, another advantage to this type of coating.
They are very high quality tubes and at one time 3500K T8 Starcoat fluorescents were extremely popular in commercial installations.
While I'm not a fan of T8 fluorescents, these days it wouldn't be a bad idea to have some in the collection.
