I'm chalking my ebay bulb experience up to be a failure.
I bought two of the 250W DE bulbs. One died after a couple weeks (a piece inside the glass broke off and was loose in there). Then the replacement that arrived wasn't the same colour temperature, so both sides of the tank looked different. As for different burn in times, one bulb only had a few weeks on the other one. Even after a couple months they still didn't match colour.
Also around the same time as getting the new ebay bulbs my (dual) Galaxy ballast tripped my GFCI almost daily. It would only trip when the ebay bulbs were in the fixture. The Pheonix 14k's wouldn't trip it!! (The GFCI tripping then apparently toasted an IC inside my Apex controller the day before I went on vacation, requiring me to reconfigure it in a very short time to using the old school timers). Then when I got back from Hawaii I had to send in my controller for repair (thankfully under warranty). <-- Lesson #1, use a dedicated DC wall wart power supply for the Apex base module and ensure it's on a different power bar/circuit. This will prevent damage when the GFCI or breaker trips.
Eventually my ballast deteriorated to the point that one lamp wouldn't ignite (it was the ballast for sure because switching the power leads around would cause the opposite lamp to ignite). Bad luck?
So the ballast was under a 5 year warranty, so Jeff @ JL replaced it. (THANKS!!!) I decided at that time to just go with new bulbs, so I bought some Hamilton 14K's to use, and put this bad experience behind me.
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