Risks of 3rd party lamps
There is an increasing amount of product emerging from the developing world that have avoided regulation in production and in choosing to never supply you these products we will not expose you to these risks: -

Health & Safety – The item you install in your projector is the result of a highly complex manufacturing process combining hazardous chemicals inside a glass capsule pressurised to over 200 atmospheres that, once 20kVof power is supplied, will then heat to over 6,000 degrees C. We wouldn’t want our customers to handle a product that hadn’t first gone through strict regulation regarding manufacture and certainly wouldn’t expose them to the resulting litigation from an injury, explosion or fire.

Performance – Over ten years of research & development has gone into the development of the projector lamp, which is then tailored to the design of each projector models’ optics. We wouldn’t risk 3rd party production techniques being able to provide the same performance levels in terms of brightness, colour rendition and, most importantly, lamp life (a small percentage saving in lamp cost is obviously a false economy if it means that the lamp will need replacing again much earlier.).

Warranty – As soon as a 3rd party lamp is used in a projector, its’ warranty is invalid. Bearing in mind that this electrical component could damage the performance of other projector components such as the power supply and ballast, this could be a very expensive risk we wouldn’t want you to take, not to mention the inconvenience of getting the projector repaired or replaced.

Legality – 3rd party manufacturers often flaunt the Intellectual Property rights of the original manufacturer. For us to sell the product could be illegal.

Branded Lamps
Branded lamps is just another way of saying 3rd party lamps. All the above risks apply as they do not perform to the specification of the original manufacturer’s lamps. Branded lamp literature states that their performance is significantly below that of the original manufacturer and will not quote a lamp life though these words rarely make it to their reseller’s media.

Identifying a copy lamp
It is not easy to identify a non genuine lamp and will no doubt get tougher in time.

Price – If the price looks too good to be true ask if the lamp is an original.

Branding – If it’s not being sold as the original manufacturers lamp but under someone else’s brand as a lamp for that projector then it will be a copy. The only current exception to this is Diamond Lamps www.diamondlamps.net that use identical bulbs sourced and supported by the original manufacturer in lower cost of ownership solutions.

Packaging – The majority or lamp boxes do not state the projector manufacturers name making them hard to distinguish from copy lamps. Using our experience we can give the following guidelines: -

• If it says “compatible with”, these are not original products
• If the labelling lists a series of projector models from different projector manufacturers, these are not original products
• If it has a company name and that name isn’t the projector manufacturer then this is probably a branded lamp and not an original
• An exception to the above is where one projector manufacturer build product for another manufacturer. For example Sharp made a few projectors for Philips and Sharp always put their logo on their boxes. The rule here is to be sure that you always recognise the manufacturer name, as it will be a household brand.