Projector lifespan

[Briz vegas]

I have a 2 year old Hitachi PJtx-10 projector. 1 month out of warrantee I now have my first dead pixel. I know that some folk get new projectors with this fault so in some ways I have been lucky. It is also up near the top corner so it is not too distracting (ie I can live with it). This projector has had an easy life so far as I watch 1 to 3 DVDs a week.

How much life are people getting out of their "older" projectors? Is one dead pixel a sign of things to come (like dead sectors on a hard drive) or is it more like a scatch on your new car (ie something that can happen if you are unlucky)?

Is is unreasonable to expect 10 years out of a projector? Mind you at the rate they are improving it will be hard to resist a new one in the next 4 or 5 years. We have a much older projector at work and it still has 100% picture quality despite the rough treatment it gets in some hands (not mine of course).

[Burke Strickland]

I've been told by an industry insider that projector manufacturers pretty much assume that owners will upgrade after about four years and so their products are not designed to last at top performance levels much beyond that. (Witness the almost inevitable decay / deterioration of organic LCD panels.) Of course, individual units may be outliers on the longevity curve, so your specific projector may well last over a decade without problems other than a few burned out bulbs along the way, or it may go "poof" the day after the warranty expires.

One dead pixel is not going "poof", even though it is a bit of an annoyance. Now if a whole cluster of pixels goes bad, or lines start etching themselves permanently into the image, or the greens start looking orange and can't be calibrated back, or the main circuit board starts smoking -- that's going "poof". At that point, given the rapid advances in projector technology and the steeply downward price curve of new models relative to their predecessors, replacement with a more recent model may make more economic sense than trying to repair the old one.

[George Bellefontaine]

My first lcd projector, a Sharp from back in "91 or '92 is now in my son's basement and still working great. Another son has my old Sony VPL400Q lcd pj that I bought in '96 or'97, and though he had to replace blue polariser plate, the old girl is still ticking. I have an NEC HT1000 dlp that's 3 years old and looks as good as the day I bought it. So, I don't know. Got a feeling it depends on any individual unit. Some last, some don't. With prices getting lower and lower, I don't think I'd be too concerned.

[draganm]

Well even if it was still under warranty, don't most companies on the market exclude dead pixles outisde the center "zone" from warranty? IMO, the only projectros that were ever designed to last a decade or 2 were the CRT machines. Most of them were designed to military specs and exremely durable. Not saying they never break, but they were designed to have modules swapped or repaired. Typical bulb machines are designed as 100% disposable. At work I called for a repair on a 4 year old Infocus and they said $2K flat rate minimum charge and possibly higher. The next sentence was "It's cheaper just to buy a new one". IT was obvious they had no interest in repairing and didn't even want to do it. We wound up getting a new 1024 x 768 rez Benq new for $1K.
I can't help but look at a new digital PJ and associate them with printers. Cheap to buy, they nail you on replacement bulbs(cartridges) , and when they break you pitch them in the trash. I still run a CRT, and not simply because I love the pic. I just have a problem with the Philosophy that in order to keep an economy viable you have to keep filling up landfills as fast as possible. Luckily for me, my electrohome Marquee is still in production in Florida, I will have parts and tubes for another decade with a little luck.
I think people will start coming around and looking at products differently. Eventually this hype of buying a new gadget every year just because t's supposedly SO much better will wear off. If Sony wants to get out of the Red they will need to change their business model as well. We were just duscussing on another forum a guy in Canada trying to sell a 540 hour sony Qualia for $15K, that's a $15K hit to take over a period of one year. Even the fairly rich buyers can't keep doing that every year?

[Briz vegas]

Thanks for the feedback! I like to buy the best I can afford and try and make it last as long as I can, although I was always aware that this projector is very much at the budget end of the spectrum. I would rather keep my projector at the back of my theatre keeping a smile on my face instead of filling up some landfill. I think the printer analogy may be spot on (I have a ten year old printer attached to my computer that most people would have binned years ago).
I will just have to hope that my projector is from the same gene pool as the ones in George's house. Maybe there is a secret to longevity - bolt it in place (I have to move mine each time I use it due to a couple of leaping felines that would sooner or later knock it off its perch), airconditioned room so it never gets too hot, lots of nature films so it gets fresh air and exercise, and no films with actors smoking

[George Bellefontaine]

Robert, if you have to move it after every use, be sure to wait until it cools down. My son is a tech and that's the advice they give people who use projectors for business use. I expect it has something to do with the heated components inside the PJ. My projectors only get moved for lamp changings or cleaning.

[JonMarsh]

We were just duscussing on another forum a guy in Canada trying to sell a 540 hour sony Qualia for $15K, that's a $15K hit to take over a period of one year. Even the fairly rich buyers can't keep doing that every year?

And what's he going to upgrade to? Oh yeah, stacked G90's. :B

Just being silly....

OTOH, I've got an NEC PG9+ and a 10PG, both 10 years old now. There's not a 10 year old digital I can think of that I'd want to watch- but then, they are in the early stages still, and getting better all the time. Biggest draw back to many of them is the relatively mediocre signal processing/scaling chips they often use internally, particularly the RPTVs.

[draganm]

airconditioned room so it never gets too hot, lots of nature films so it gets fresh air and exercise, and no films with actors smoking

I would mount it to the ceiling, heck with a bulb machine you only need 3 screws. Keeping the fliter clean and outside of a smoking environment is no joke. These machines have a very short life span in a typical bar environment for just this reason, the soot clogs the filter and everytihng inside cooks. George makes a good point too, the tendency is to turn the PJ off and unplug it, big mistake. The fans run after power down to keep the temp. inside from boiling.

And what's he going to upgrade to? Oh yeah, stacked G90's. :B
Just being silly....

no I doubt it, prolly aiming for a sony Rudy although that will be obsolete by this time next year, maybe sooner. I have some friends in this category, constantly buying new stuff just for the thrill of it and never happy with it for long. You definitely wouldn't want a pair of G90's with this personality. Awfully hard to deal with 500 pounds of video equipment your suddenly un-happy with. :B

[Dean McManis]

I always like buying the hand-me-downs of rich early adopters. :T

As far as LCD goes, I've owned 3 now (1 RPTV, 2 FPTV) and all of them had zero dead or stuck pixels when I bought them, or when I sold them (often years later), so maybe I've been lucky, or maybe it's just that peope who have had problems are very vocal about their reliability issues.

I also owned 3 LCOS, and 2 DLP FPTVs with no pixel problems at all there either. :B

[draganm]

I always like buying the hand-me-downs of rich early adopters. :T

LOL, it does seem like the last 2 or 3 G90's on flea-bay came from uber-wealthy peoples homes. Kinda wierd really, 99% of CRT projectors were bought my Industry and Military. Consdiering Sony only made about 1000 G90's in the US, it's odd so many were bought by private users with deep pockets. So Dean are you saying out of a dozen bulb machines you never had one fail in any way, or were just the pixels reliable?

[Dean McManis]

My JVC G15 has some sort of an issue now where it shuts off after playing for 5 minutes. But it's about 5 years old now, and if I put my mind to it I can probably figure out the problem. I have owned 4 JVC LCOS projectors, and the others were flawless throughout the years that I owned them.

None of any of the other digital projectors that I owned (including a Sony LCD RPTV that I had for 5 years) ever had any mechanical problems, including dead/stuck pixels.

My Toshiba CRT RPTV would have cost me about $3200 in repairs, if they weren't covered under factory warranty, and when the warranty ran out it did cost me about $650 to have it fixed. I also had an Electrohome CRT front projector which had a failed daughterboard, which would have cost around $1700 to replace if it wasn't covered under warranty.

I had a Sony 1292Q (the G90's predecessor, also with 9" CRTs) and it ran flawlessly in the couple years that I owned it, but I would shudder to think about any repair costs if it had broken down. Especially since there are so few around anymore, and they are well out of factory warranty now.

The top CRT FPTVs are kinda like classic Rolls Royces. You can buy an older one for the price of a new Honda Accord, and being that they were built to such high standards they are likely to be reliable, and you cannot miss the top-notch workmanship and quality. So the value relative to the original king's ransom price is impressive. But a simple brake job costs $2500, which is important to know up front.