In the Japanese market, there is a far greater market for higher colour temperature lamps such as this - in fact, Japan is one of the few places in the world where there is still a strong demand for non-colour corrected high pressure mercury vapour lamps on account of their high colour temperature.  They as a market, are also very picky about the quality of the lighting - this tends to spill over to the lighting devices themselves as well, the Iwasaki-EYE range for instance are so beautifully well made that they are almost works of art.

This domestic lamp from Panasonic doesn't attain quite such high marks in terms of build quality, but is certainly a very well presented product, the overall build quality seeming slightly above that usually seen in domestic CFLs - that said - it ain't exactly cheap either!  The only site I could find which had this model listed was in Germany and was selling these lamps for €15.  While the Philips Genie range these days can be readily picked up in supermarkets for less than £1.  Given the price difference there, you'd be expecting this to be a bit of a premium product.

I have to confess to being a little puzzled as to the intented application for this lamp - reflector type CFLs are not all that unusual these days - but they tend to be fitted with more conventional R shaped outer bulbs or plastic reflectors to direct the light - rather than the slightly elongated globe fitted to this lamp.  The fact that this lamps reflector does not go sufficiently far along the bulb to fully shield the U-bends of the discharge tube result in a lamp which is vaguely directional - but with a very, very wide viewing angle.  The only application I could see this lamp maybe serving particularly well would be in a recessed fixture, though I think that a conventional R style lamp would do just as good a job there if it was able to fit.

The light from this lamp is a very neutral white, which utterly baffles the colour balance on my camera.  It's not quite the cold blue of 6400K lamps which simular daylight, but it's far colder (i.e. higher colour temperature) than 2600 or 3000K which are far more common - I think it's probably about 5000K, which also ties in with the only information I've been able to find on the model number as it's available today.  For a 15W lamp, it's really quite bright I think too - though the reflector style does make it a bit hard to judge.

My only gripe with this lamp is that there's a bit of "hazy" residue on the inside of the glass outer globe.  Whether this is a residue that's been there since manufacture, I don't know, it may also have occurred while the lamp was in storage.  If anyone else has one of these and can vouch for the clarity or otherwise of the globe I'd be most interested to hear.

Panasonic lamps don't appear all that often over here, so I'm glad to have this one in my collection.