A few years ago (I want to say five, but the wife thinks fewer), we got a big 50-inch LCD projection TV. From the front it looks like a flat-panel, but it isn't, instead being wedged-shaped with all of the projection stuff on the bottom. We like it, and it beat the heck out of the price of comparable flat-panels at the time.

Last week a warning came on telling us that the lamp inside needed replacing, so I ordered a new one. It arrived today and I put it in.

The first gripe I have is that the thing was ordered on Wednesday, during the "order before, ship today" period, with a small bump in shipping to get the two-day delivery. I expected it on Friday. I was miffed when it didn't appear on Saturday. Expected no delivery on Sunday. Was concerned there might not be delivery on President's Day. A small bit of "shrug it off" when the lamp arrived late in the afternoon. I'm home for the day (client is closed), so I was able to get it off the porch right away. I was busy with other things, though, so it sat for a couple hours until the wife got home.

The next gripe is that there's no instructions. I looked through the manual that came with the TV. Steps one through four are all about turning the TV off and allowing time for it to cool. Step five is to finish the instructions as provided with the replacement lamp. Unfortunately, despite the "quick-start instructions" listed in the contents printed on the box (which comically also listed "made in Taiwan" as a content of the box; well, it made me chuckle), there were no instructions. A quick search on the Internet turned into a long search which led me to discover that one can buy the service manual for as little as $15 or as much as $200 (where I looked, anyway). Not interested.

All I wanted was an indicator where I had to open or unscrew a panel to reveal the old lamp. It's a big housing that looks like it just plugs and screws in...replacement should be like "slide out old lamp, slide in new lamp..." I just didn't know where to do it. In some forum I found a one-liner indicating that there's a plastic panel on the front of the TV that needs to be popped out, a door unscrewed, the housing unscrewed, remove, reverse, done... No pictures, but after unscrewing the wrong door first, I found the one I needed... It's the one UNDER the "lamp will be hot" warning, the one with one screw, not NEXT TO the warning label, not the one with two screws. So close.

Then there's the annoying bit of the pop-up message that warns that the lamp needs replacing. I figured that somehow the module knew how long it'd been used, or knew the lumens it was kicking out, or some other such metric, but evidently that's not in the module. Another bit of searching and I found that there's a magic combination of buttons to reset the lamp timer:

Hold the Vol- on the TV and hold the SPLIT on the original remote until the "reset" message appears.

After I found that one I found that holding the ong> buttons on both will bring up the service menu, and in there is a function to review the current lamp timer and properties, and also to reset the timer.

Oh well, the lamp is replaced. Hopefully this one lasts another five years (or fewer, if you believe the wife instead).

Oh, an aside, during my searches I found many sites stating how to take the housing apart and replace the lamp with a different one. Looking at it, though, the replacement lamp was $5 more than the replacement housing where I got mine, which was the cheapest place I'd found while shopping... Why bother taking it apart, cutting wires and soldering, when I can just unplug and re-plug?