Edited now.The flux capacitor is going to set you back some serious dough.
Everything I've seen says that it makes no difference whether they are run on AC or DC.Is a soft start worth the loss of filament life due to DC versus AC?
Any incandescent bulb vaporizes the tungsten filament. A halogen bulb is designed to keep the tungsten from depositing inside the bulb, and instead to redeposit on the filament thereby lengthening its life. That much is not disputed.Everything I've seen says that it makes no difference whether they are run on AC or DC.
In this case it is being fed full wave rectified AC so the voltage still goes up and down just the same - it just doesn't reverse direction.
How do they know the difference?
Nope. How do power tools do it? Many of them have a soft start these days but I can only think of the motorized examples.So, do you know of a circuit which achieves the same end, but driving the lamp with AC?