Sanyo XM100L Projector

[synaesthesia]

Just had an apparent lamp failure on a 3 year old XM100L projector by Sanyo.

There's no way on earth that it's actually anywhere near it's projected lamp life, barely a fraction in fact. However on Friday the lamp keeled over. Showed an image (a perfectly sharp image like it was brand new) for a minute then disappears, showing the "LAMP" and "LAMP REPLACE" LEDs.

 

Something I've not seen in projectors lamps before, this has a chip on it which makes me wonder if it's not too dissimilar to what we get on ink/toner cartridges that means the ink (in this case lamp) is perfectly fine.

The lamp itself looks brand new - no yellowing, no cracks on the seals, and the picture it gives is spot on.

Anyone know of anything to look out for in this instance? We've got a lamp on order but I'd rather not waste a perfectly usable lamp just because someone possibly deems 3 years perfectly long enough without a thought it may have only clocked up a couple of hundred lamp hours!

[TheMrB]

Not sure how much this'll help. But. We use NECs and Sanyos (Now Panasonics) here and we have come across something similar, but on the NEC projectors.

They would refuse to switch on until a new lamp was fitted once they got to a certain point in the lamp counter.

I discovered that fitting a new lamp, resetting the counter and fitting the old one back would get me the extra, in most cases for classrooms here, year or so that I was looking for.

 

It's the simplest of things, and I'm sure you've done all this, but we make a habit of checking the projectors each holiday and resetting the lamp counter so we don't trip across it again. The second it starts to yellow, we replace the lamp to prevent it blowing and causing havoc.

[john]

On the NECs you can hold a couple of buttons down on the remote to reset the Lamp lockout when that does happen it has been discussed on here before