Cheap projector bulb?

knightstyle

I have the chance to buy a NEC GT1150 projector but when I looked at the price of a replacement bulb it was £450 to £520.
Wow, I had no idea they could cost anyway near that! They should last up to 1500 hours.
So how robust are the bulbs? Any where to buy them a bit, no a lot cheaper?

fwor

With older projectors there were simple measures that you could take to prolong lamp life (soft-start - at it's simplest you just half-wave rectify the mains on power-up to reduce the shock to the filament at switch-on). But that almost certainly won't work with modern ones, as they will probably refuse to power on at all without full input voltage.

Leaving aside the power-on shock, the bulb filaments are most fragile immediately after you turn them off, so if you can avoid moving it or causing any vibration to it for a few minutes after switching it off you should get most life out of it.

When I had to buy a projector bulb, the most expensive (by a long way) were the companies that specialised in projectors. The cheapest were the big electricians suppliers like TLC (tlc-direct online) and QVS (qvsdirect).

sharkie

knightstyle wrote: »

I have the chance to buy a NEC GT1150 projector but when I looked at the price of a replacement bulb it was £450 to £520.
Wow, I had no idea they could cost anyway near that! They should last up to 1500 hours.
So how robust are the bulbs? Any where to buy them a bit, no a lot cheaper?

Doh :T, £88.96 + free p&p. Just please tell me in this day and age you already looked there but missed it

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Projector-Bare-Lamp-NEC-GT1150-GT2150-GT50LP-B-/290522616162?pt=UK_AudioElectronicsVideo_Video_TelevisionSetTopBoxes&hash=item43a47f5162