You clearly know more about the subject than I do.
DE is just a lamp. In all other respects it's a completely conventional high frequency digital ballast.
This problem will resolve itself because the next generation of drivers will be running DC current.
thatll be something, for sure. Eliminating AC from the picture. Assuming LED doesnt take over entirely before then. since LED driver is already DC, but that would require the right products being available at the right time. for a fair price, and we are far from there yet. right now, of the thousands of led's avaible, the COB is the first I have heard anything good about. I understand the draw to LED, I would love to have half the power draw, but I am waiting for the next round of tech to come around, now that there is something decent on the market. I might be willing to experiment with the diy COB, but for now, after spending a lot of time researching it, i'v decided against CMH, in favor of DE bulbs, and focal point reflectors, on existing drivers. which seems to make the most sense at this point in time. its actually going to cost the same per light as cmh.
There is something to be learned from all this, and I think everyone can agree that we cannot depend on horticultural companies to tell us the truth, because the truth is not their friend. Its up to us to educate ourselves, which is not easy, and very time consuming, assuming your not an electrical engineer, which most of us are not, myself included. We need to follow what the commercial lighting manufacturers are doing. When you consider most of the only inovative new products in HID horti lighting, came from Philips, and copied by others. I am mainly talking about double end, but the latest Agro Elite 315 looks promising, and even the older cmh were very innovative for their time, but has been argued to death whether there is anything to be gained at all from anything other than HPS. It is obviously difficult for us as a group to agree on anything when we are getting 100 different sources of misinformation telling us how to spend our next fortune on their cheap tech.
There are so many more HID lamps out there than people realize. They light factories, showrooms, musuems, and even street lights, and they are all switching to full spectrum lighting, simply because of the quality of light percieved by humans is best when closely matched to sunlight.
My latest reserach project after beating the CMH topic to a pulp, and every other philips product of consequence. I stumbled across another commercial lighting manufacturer called Venture, and they have some very interesting tech indeed. Again, I am not trying to advocate any type of lighting, only to share information. There is a new breed of FS MH's apparently, now that are advertising the same life as LEDs, and a spectrum that is almost completely flat all the way from UV to IR(minus the UV shield), looks more like a plasma or something than a MH. 40khrs from a single bulb on a matched electronic square wave ballast up to 400w. I dont even know what to say to that.. 40k hours is something I will have to see for myself, and 26k hrs on one of their matched mag ballasts and maybe 20k on retrofit pulse start ballast, all at 90% lumen maintenance over their life. And they make them up to 975w on mag ballast, with the same spectrum. last time I checked they are only about $50 for a 575w ballasts are around $100 but require some assembly...lol. they do have enclosed ballasts, and enclosures for their kits, but i'm sure thats a lot more costly. Thats just one of their products, they have a lot more I havent even had time to look at, including PAR LED's. Its too bad they refuse to get directly involved with Agri business, because I think they could very well have a lot to offer us in ballast tech if nothing else. They have a huge international commercial market to attend to so they made a child company they call sunmaster, so after some technical discussions with Venture's MFR reps I was refferred to sunmaster. who is apparently made by Venture lighting, and offers a simliar spectrum on a 6k bulb instead of the 5k bulb from venture. But the real difference is that it can run on any eballast or pulse start MH mag. Which may seem like a good thing, limits you to 5k hrs and twice the cost per bulb, because of our crappy ballasts we cannot get the same life out of a seemingly similar bulb. I would rather pay half the price for bulbs and spend the rest on ballast tech that equals 26khrs-40k hrs. keep in mind the spectral output may degrade over time, but venture apparently is the supplier for some 80% of gases used in full spectrum bulbs made by other companies, so it sounds like they know what they are doing. we would need a spectroradiometer and some serious time to know for sure.
So it looks like even streetlights(you know the ones that look real white) are running better quality light than we are, which is pretty sad if you ask me, we definitely do not have the best tech available, and we should be looking elsewhere. This is why I have been researching commercial lighting. It has been said before that CMH is old news. CMH was the first step anybody has taken out of the horti market for lighting, which is likely the reason people argue this topic to death on a daily basis.
We are so stuck in our ways, we have changed the genetics of the plant to favor HPS further skewing our data, for any other kind of lighting. Since everything is crossed with everything these days, we will probably never get rid of those traits entirely even when everyone is running full spec led's or hid's whatever tech leads this market.
We really should move the discussion to a new "lighting tech" thread since the discussion has become about more than just CMH. So we can all share the newest tech on the market. really we should have a whole organized section for lighting tech where we can discuss each tech in detail.
The attached spectral chart is for the sunmaster 6k bulb. I'm gonna try one and maybe get some use out of my cheap eballast while were at it, and we will see how the spectrum performs, and then maybe invest in venture bulbs and drivers.
to view the venture spectrum (very sexy) look to page 9
http://www.venturelighting.com/On-LineCatalog/Venture_Lighting_Interactive_Catalog_v1.pdf