The metal halide lamps are now widely used in the application and commercial lighting due to their attracting properties such as good color rendering and high efficiency. But, they have the serious problem of acoustic resonance for high frequency operation and they need the high voltage to ignite. So, they have not been applied to indoors. Over the past few years, a considerable number of studies have been conducted on the electronic ballast together with hot restarting and resonance phenomenon. But, Very few attempts have been made with the adaptive ignition method according to the lamp state. In this paper, electronic ballast is proposed for metal halide lamps with an igniter for adaptive ignition. The proposed electronic ballast can generate different ignition voltages according to the arc tube state.