XM vs. Ushio bulbs
 

Howdy,

It's time to change the bulbs in my Hamilton 2x175w fixture. I have Hamilton 10K bulbs now and my ballast is a probe start. I am looking at the XM or Ushio 10K bulbs and I was wondering if anyone who may have used both could tell me which they liked better and why. Any feedback would be much appreciated.

this should be easy.. ushio bulbs won't fire on hamilton ballasts correctly so my vote would be xm then :mrgreen:

According to all knowing guru Sanjay:

http://www.reeflightinginfo.arvixe.c...rmancedata.php

they work fine on a standard M57 ballast and give a higher PPFD and better colour performance than on an electronic ballast. :)

I had Ushio's and now XM's. The XM's are far brighter, but have had a couple bad bulbs. With the ushios I feel I have a more stable bulb when it comes to colour temp. But they both are good bulbs. My corals haven't changed under one or the other.

dude if you wanna blow your dough on ushios only to find out that if and when they fire your water looks like lemonaid, power to you. retailers won't return them. if you don't belive me call j&l and tell then what brand of ballast you have and see what they say.

Thanks for the feedback. What kind of ballasts were you running these bulbs on? When you had bad XM bulbs were you able to return them?

Iwasaki 14K 175W
 

As an alternative, I have been hearing some good things about the Iwasaki 14K 175W. Has anyone seen these bulbs at an LFS?

I was running them on Icecaps. Returning them was no prob, I got them from J&L's, just had to pay $10 to ship them back which sucked.
Like Willow said make sure the bulb can run on your type of ballast.

FYI:

J&L gives store credit for the return shipping cost when you are returning because of defective or broken equipment.

if your bulb won't fire or looks yellow because because you bought a bulb that won't fire on your ballast it's not defective and they will not return it. my gf is going thru this with them now.