Projector bulbs - brightness vs life expectancy

[Duke5A]

I guess I never really noticed before since we've only had ceiling mounted projectors for a few years now, but the bulbs in these things are needing to be replaced a lot sooner than I would have thought. The projectors are Optoma TW675UTi-3D with the bulbs advertising a 2500 hour lifespan. I'm finding that in many classrooms the picture is so dull they can barely be seen with the shades drawn and the lights off at only 1500 hours. Is this normal? If it is I can't believe you could advertise a lifespan like this and have it be so useless at 2/3rds of the way through its time. These things are $300USD a pop!

[elsiegee40]

It is hard to give a lifespan in terms of days as it depends on how long they are switched on for each day... and that will vary from classroom to classroom. Even with a good cleaning schedule, the image starts to become discoloured after 2-3 years of regular use and a new bulb won't fix that either.

 

Many of us have been dumping standard projectors and going for LED projectors instead. They are more expensive, but there are no filters to clean and the Epson ones, in the UK at least, come with a 5 year warranty. This makes them a similar cost over time... and they don't fade and they don't discolour and they don't have bulbs that are expensive to replace and you can switch them on and off every 30 seconds if you want to.

 

I understand that an ultra short throw LED is due to be launched later this year by Epson and will be interested to see the price.

[DMcCoy]

LEDs also have a significant (but improved over recent years) drop in brightness over usage, it's difficult to find any time/brightness graphs for LEDs but the ones I did find show anything up to 20% loss over the first 5000 hours with LED.

[Zourous]

You might want to check they aren't running in eco mode if it has this feature.