Now these I ended up in an argument with someone over on LG. I said yes these are good but the old merc lamps would still last longer? The old Wotans of the early 80s were awsome! The other person disagreed and said these would last longer? I've heard of stories of the old Philips ones and American GEs doing like 20+ years!

You probably will get some lasting that long but not all of them, after all the rated lifetime is to 50% failures in a batch so you'll get some lamps that will do a hell of a lot longer than that and some that will fail quite early on! The impressive thing about these is that Philips claim a lifetime of 12,000 hours to 5% failures when the original HPL-N was only rated at 16,000 hours to 50% failures!!! It looks like they have tried very hard to eliminate early failures.

I have a couple of these and the build quality is not amazing. However, 12k hours at 5% failure rate is an impressive claim as long as it is true! I do believe that a lot of the good old mercs from the '70s and '80s regularly did well in excess of their rated lifespan while still delivering decent lumen maintenance.

I was just thinking that tbh, if a merc can allegedly last 20 years... Would it really be providing any useful light anyway? The new phosphors in these are far superior though IMO. Very good CRI for a merc!

Wonder if we will get our MBFs back once we`re out of the EU joke?

What is the phosphor formulation of this lamp?