Just wanted to express my disappointment and give a warning about the newest Sylvania Octron Ecologic lamps. My advice: don't bother. My school bought a case of the /735s recently, and the ones that have been installed start out dark (really dark!) in the middle every time. The Alto IIs, on the other hand, have been much better. Also quite surprisingly, the Chinese Satco/Hygrade T8s my school bought last summer have been excellent: full-brightness startups every time. I have some GE Ecolux T8s that are a couple of years old in one of my basement fixtures and those are great, but I haven't tried the latest ones.

Just goes to show that American-made doesn't necessarily mean better quality. This has also somewhat changed my opinion of Sylvania. No more Octrons for this guy.

I am pretty sure that Sylvania uses amalgam mercury which is why the tubes require warm-up time. The quality of the tubes is decent - if they are used commercially they generally perform well. I will agree that some of the Satco fluorescent products are good, although their incandescent bulbs are junk. I have had some Satco 5 Watt CFLs running for years - one failed early, but the other five are still going.
However, I think GE currently makes the best fluorescent tubes - they seem to perform well and have good light output. I put 15 GE F28T8 XL SPX41 ECO tubes into use at work (some of them run 24/7) over two years ago and none have failed, nor do they look like they will be failing anytime soon. The fixtures are even instant start!

I haven't had a chance to gauge how bright Sylvania's low-mercury lamps are at start-up, but even if they are worse than Philips', I would take them over Philips any day. From what I've heard they don't suffer from mercury starvation nearly as bad as Philips.

I would agree with DTS that GE seems to lead the pack for low-mercury lamps right now.

I'm seeing the same issues with the newest GE tubes that we see with the new Ecologic II Sylvania bulbs.  Dim in the middle on cold start up.  We have a new church building that was lamped with all GE products when built late last year.  A few of the tubes have suffered EoL failures after only several months of use, but I believe that may be a result of the building having to be powered by generator power for a few months until the utility company was able to get the power line infrastructure built up into that area.  I just broke open a caste of Sylvania F32T8 tubes to replace burned out tubes in other buildings.  I have found that if I let the tubes "burn-in" for about an hour or more before turning them off after their first start-up, they seem to function much better with less dimming in the middle during start-up.  Same goes for the GEs. 

The issues I'm seeing with Phillips over the past several years is that the cathodes/filaments seem to be much weaker as compared to the first and second gen TL-70 series Altos.  I am seeing 30,000+ hours on the 1st and 2nd gen Altos in some of our older church buildings that were equipped with them when built back in the late 90s and early 2000s.  Very impressive.  Yet one of our buildings built about 6 years ago and also installed with Phillips 700 series has seen over 75% of the tubes failing thus far with less than 15,000 hours on most.  The filaments seem to be very fragile. 

With all the fluorescent (CFL and Tubes) relamping I've done, I've found the most success with Sylvania products, followed by GE, and then Phillips.  If Phillips still had the first gen Alto TL70s out there I'd use them over the others, as hard as it is for me to admit that as I have been very loyal to Sylvania over the years followed by GE. 

Well, hopefully Satco won't change anything in their manufacturing process, because as far as F32T8s go, they're currently beating the big three.

The Satco fluorescent tubes are surprisingly good, but I think the GE T8 XL tubes are better.

I've installed a few more of the new Sylvania T8s in newly re-ballasted T-8 fixtures.  Yes they start out dim in the center but after leaving the laps on for about 30 min, all cold restarts afterwords have been just fine, like all other typical T-8s, a little dim but warms up fast.  Nowhere near as dim as fresh out of the box. 

They recently built a new Dol-Gen store close to me, and it was lamped with GE F32/841/XL. I saw 8 or 10 lamps that were mercury starved within the first month!