Short life sample Pastel "Mood" Light bulbs

[Rubberfingers]

Does anyone know anything about these?. They were similar to the Softone range of incandescent light bulbs, but were produced as samples with a life of about 15 -20 hours, which was stated on the packaging. The idea was that you liked the trial version and bought a normal 1000 hour version. Must have been late 1980's/early 1990's. Does anyone have any further information?

[G6Tanuki]

I wonder if they were perhaps "production-line rejects" that didn't meet the full spec but the manufacturers still wanted to get some value out of them?

it was quite common in the 60s for manufacturers who were bringing a production-line on-stream to offer the first-production-runs on a "not guaranteed to meet full-spec" basis - I acquired various VHF power-amp valves from Eimac, and HF power-transistors from Motorola, on this basis - they were a great way to see if your mechanical-engineering was good, and that the devices actually fitted the holes in the product you'd designed!

[broadgage]

Bizarre IMHO.

The short life lamps presumably ran the filament very much hotter. A 60 watt filament designed to last for 20 hours will be very much brighter than a 1000 hour filament of 60 watts consumption.
It will also give a noticeably different colour of light.
Therefore the short life lamp would not give a reasonable representation of either the light output or the colour of the full life article.

The "sample" lamps might of course have of a reduced wattage, but that would still be confusing to the consumer if this reduced wattage was marked on the lamps or the packaging, and the colour temperature would still be different.

[emeritus]

Never heard of anything like that. I guess the short life could have been obtained by providing an overrun filament, but that would probably have resulted in a brighter bulb than the1000 hour version. Older pre-quartz slide projector bulbs had a design life of circa 25 hours, however I do recall a column by a professional projectionist in the Amateur Photographer where he said that, since investing in a Variac to slowly bring the bulb up to full brightness he had never had any bulbs fail, only replacing them when the internal blackening reduced the light output too much. Possibly a weak internal fuse was used?

[dominicbeesley]

Maybe just overrun a small part of the filament?

[Radio Wrangler]

Any bulb like this would not cost less to make than the full life version... likely they would cost more. Thinner wire is harder to make and the turnover would be low and they'd need separate packaging and marketing.

Light bulb manufacturers were up to every trick in the book for extracting profit, so they'd only do something at a relative loss if it opened up much greater profits later.

David