| Manufacturer: | Philips |
| Model: | TL 8W/35 - Pink Coated |
| Application: | General Lighting / Decorative / Special Effects |
| Wattage: | 8W |
| Diameter (max): | 15mm |
| Length: | 300mm (including pins) |
| Tube Length: | 265mm |
| Bulb/Tube material: | Glass, halophosphor inner coating. Pink external laquer finish. |
| Colour Temperature: | Pink. |
| Peak output wavelength: | Unknown |
| Total Light Output: | Unknown |
| Rated lifetime: | Unknown |
| Cap: | Bi-Pin fluorescent fitting |
| Operating voltage: | 56V AC |
| Operating current: | 145mA |
| Warmup/restrike time: | 1 minutes/none |
| Cost (original): | Unknown |
| Value (now): | £5.00 approx. |
| Place of manufacture: | Holland |
| Date of manufacture: | August 1988 - Date code H8 shown on lamp. |
| Lamp Status: | Working, used - no packaging provided. |
Now here's a bit of a head scratcher.
Quite an old 3500K white 8W fluorescent tube which has been coated with
a really vivid pink lacquer. It's unclear whether the lamp left
the factory like this, whether the finish was applied by a distributor,
or whether the end user applied it for a reason such as using the light
for theatrical effects - which it could have provided quite an
effective low intensity colour wash. Pink coloured tubes do exist, but I'm
not sure if in such a low wattage if they would be hard to find even back in the
late 80s, and even then the colour produced would be more of a pasted shade than
the vivid colour of this one.
The heat of the tube as you can see has resulted in the finish
shrinking and cracking quite a bit, resulting in quite an interesting
crackled finish. While a bit of an issue if the tube is directly
viewed - if this were to be used indirectly to provide background
lighting or similar effects that's really not a problem unless a very
large amount of it flakes off, to the extent that it could
significantly reduce the saturation of the colour.
The colour is actually much as you see it below - really quite a
saturated "hot pink" colour when lit. The tube takes on more of a
magenta hue when viewed unlit though...a colour which plays havoc with
any digital camera's colour balance and doesn't get treated too kindly
by JPEG compression...so the images maybe aren't quite as clean looking
as they might normally be.
The spectral plot did come out quite well though - the main notable
function that this coating serves you can quite clearly see is that it
completely suppresses the normally very visible green mercury line and
significantly attenuates the somewhat dimmer blue one.
Philips TL 8W/35 - Pink Coated Fluorescent Tube - General overview
Philips TL 8W/35 - Pink Coated Fluorescent Tube - Detail of lamp cap
Philips TL 8W/35 - Pink Coated Fluorescent Tube illuminating my workstation and side of my room from a distance of approximately two metres
Philips TL 8W/35 - Pink Coated Fluorescent Tube - Shown while alight
Philips TL 8W/35 - Pink Coated Fluorescent Tube - Shown held in hand to show relative scale
Philips TL 8W/35 - Pink Coated Fluorescent Tube Output Spectra
Philips TL 8W/35 - Pink Coated Fluorescent Tube - Detail of text
printed on tube
This lamp added to the Virtual Display Shelf on the 27th August 2010 at 23:35.
References: F8T5 Datasheet on SLI Lighting's website (to obtain current/voltage specs).
Acknowledgements: Many thanks to the website visitor who donated this (and many other) lamps for display.
This page last updated:
19th June 2023: Made changes to page formatting to improve readability on mobile devices, also made some background code changes to improve search engine behaviour.
