XE-40 known fault and bulb life

[sbutterworthtj]

We recently had a visit from an engineer to turn up the fan speed on our 30 Sanyo XE-40 projectors. This happened after we reported a couple of these as faulty, and Promethean told us the rest had to be modified. It turns out that the fan speed was set to low, the projectors were overheating and the thermal trip was being triggered.

All were fixed in January, but one of our XE-40s now needs its bulb replacing after just over 1500 hours. Last session we had to replace a bulb on another XE-40 after only just over 1000 hours.

My question is this: if the bulbs are reaching the end of their lives prematurely as a result of a fault with the projectors, are we due any compensation for the cost of new bulbs? We have 30 of these projectors and a loss of ¼ of the life-span on each one would cost us in the region of £1,500.

Interested to hear your thoughts!

Tim

[MarionSh]

Tim,
Good luck with the compensation claim!
Projectors are the weak point in the interactive whiteboard setup, and we as a school have always struggled to get good impartial advice. Our original Sanyos didn't last very long - although we'd cleaned the filters every 4 weeks as told the dust accumulated so that after 12-18 months the images were very poor, and very expensive internal optical cleans only improved them slightly. We had to bite the bullet and buy replacements, and changed to DLP technology so we don't have to clean filters (so no more Sanyos). We've had HPs (both failed after a few weeks!), then cheaper Optomas (good but image degraded after 2 years) and have recently purchased Mitsubushi's. All of them have niggles (like friendliness of the remote control, lack of Freeze or no-show etc), and each time the position on the ceiling has to change which almost doubles the cost.
We haven't had problems with lamps going, but have now been advised to turn them off as often as possible to let the internal electronics cool down, as the constant high temps cause damage leading to the image degrading. (Previously the advice had been to switch on/off as infrequently as possible to preserve the lamp!).
We now budget to replace our 16 projectors every 2-3 years - an enormous cost for a school budget.
As the quality of the projector is so crucial to the effectiveness of the board I'd love to have a forum on projectors to learn from the experiences of others - and hopefully get the manufacturers to really design aprojector and its remote for the classroom (and not just to paint it orange).