My first experience seeing Self Ballasted Mercury Vapor lamp was at the indoor gym room in some school that I went during summer of 1973.

There was mime show for the deaf.  Toward the end of the show, they ask anyone who has idea to use as in mime.  I stood up and approached to the stage and described the light bulb and the power to the light bulb.  Indeed, they did performed the plugging into the mimed light bulb where one was looking for outlet and plugged in to make the light bulb "shine".

When the show was over, I saw the gym ceiling lights come on as incandesent light bulb thinking it was an ordinary light bulb.  In approximately 5 minutes later, the color of the light bulb was changing into blue color light.  As I was a child, I understood that it was a special light until years later that I learned it was self ballasted mercury light bulb.

I first saw them in '84 in the multi-purpose room of the school I went to. The SBMVs were in RLM fixtures mixed in with MH gym lights. I thought they were regular mercury lamps, but some of them eventually went out and were replaced by 300w mogul based incandescent lamps. I remember one of the incandescents was a clear silver bowl, rare eh? Oh and that school had a deaf program that I was in at the time.

Hmm, actually never. never seen ANY CMV. in my life. i want to acquire one though.

I've seen one in ~1994, my first year on university, when here CFL's were more an expensive novelty item then a thing for daily use. As i was interested in their design, i was looking for some, in order to do some reverse engineering, i visit some shops. And the guy behind the counter n one of them offered me something i have never seen before: "high pressure MV with integrated ballast" (it's how he called it). I wondered, how the ballast (at that time i knew only series choke or HF electronic concepts) for such powerful thing might fit into so small bulb and capable to run such hot. What a surprise, when i peeked inside, there was nothing more complex then incandescent style filament... This bulb was too expensive for me at the time and i considered it as too powerful (it was Philips 230V/100W), so i didn't bought it, but it was the first time i saw such lamp and moreover i was able to play with it a bit...

I first saw self-ballasted mercury vapour lamps running in fixtures like this one when I was about 10 or so around 1980.I noticed these bucket fixtures designed for self-ballasted MV lamps for sale in hardware stores back then also.I used to check out the Philips 160W self-ballasted replacement lamps they sold,the price was pretty expensive at over $60.00,I never did buy a self-ballasted lamp.

I first saw one in a community center gym in Florida about 5 years ago. They were used in the highbay lighting. Very interesting lamps, never got one myself though.

I first saw mine at a farm market store, there was about 5-6 160W coated SBMVs in pendant lights (they looked like this pendant fixture in Jace's album) over the cash registers. I think one was a BT shaped lamp while the others were ED shaped.

There's a local lighting store near me that sells these SBMV lamps though but I don't know how much is it.

I've yet to see one "in the glass." The only ones I've seen have been in catalogs or on this site. I'd love to have one, though - especially a high wattage model.