Understanding the Projector Lamp and Its Bulb System

The projector lamp: It's one of those things you know is critical, but you haven't really stopped to think about too much, right? As long as it's working, that's where your interest ends.

It's a good thing to understand, and it covers them well. Starting with the basics, the most important part of your projector is, as you might have guessed, the projector lamp. That's what takes the images or video signal coming into your projector and puts them onto a large screen.

And the bulb is the most important part of the lamp -- not synonymous with the lamp. As the site explains, "every projector lamp has several different parts... varying types of projectors will use and house the projector lamps in slightly different ways. However, they all use the bulb and projector lamp."

You might hear the system that the projector uses in order to project imagery referred to as the illumination system. Same thing -- "the bulb and projector lamp are housed together and usually located within the projector itself behind an access door, since the projector lamp's bulb will eventually have to be replaced."

There are many different types of bulbs for projector lamps, but the two most popular are halogen bulbs and metal halide bulbs. Halogen bulbs are cheaper, but don't last as long as metal halide bulbs -- the classic tradeoff. Halogen bulbs often produce a yellow tint on the imagery being projected, so metal halide bulbs are seen as worth the expense in many instances. And "some large projectors use bulbs that are referred to as Xenon lamps, which are used largely because of the incredible color reproduction they are able to achieve."

And remember that different projectors will use the projector lamps in various ways because of design. Some projectors may have varying placement of panels or mirrors and also might have different numbers of panels, compared to other projectors that all use the same projector lamps.