On site now, hoping for some helpful thoughts for an email later tonight.

At a massage school mounting Epson EX3212 projectors -- cheap and simple. In classroom use, if they use the projector for ten minutes, then practice for twenty minutes what they've seen, do they get the best bulb life by turning the projector off, then back on in 20 minutes, or just muting the video so a black screen is projected? What do you know about the tradeoff between multiple times turning on, and just staying on?

TIA

can't really help with that, cycling a projector does shorten a bulb a bit but I never did any real studies on how much so it is hard to say at exactly what point it makes sense to leave it on and you are probably around that point.


But what I would recommend is a macro or timer that turns it off when it should not be used (like let's say at 111PM). I don't know about a massage school (I am guessing it is relatively small and so it is up to one or two people to use it) but I definitely had that issue in conference rooms where people would forget to turn it off and stayed running all night. You can't do that for residential, but I consider it a must have for corporate customers.

Though this projector is cheap -- it's so cheap that it's got a method of video muting consisting of sliding a built-in piece of plastic in front of the lens so light can't escape... so cheap! But it has a SLEEP function that turns it off after a time of no video, which you can preset by the minute. So we can set it up with an emergency shutoff.

This school has seven locations around California, but like most schools is doing things on a budget. There will be no remotes other than the factory remotes, so macros are not a possibility.

Before I got there, the sound portion for each of the three rooms was a Denon cheapo AVR set to multichannel stereo, and four ceiling speakers. People there think things don't work right all the time, not realizing the problems you can have with multiple ignorant users of an AVR with front-panel surround mode controls and no center speaker to play if some idiot sets it to Prologic. At least prior usage, when using the BD (which is also their CD Player) was to run HDMI directly to the projector. They avoided nonsense that would come up if they ran through the AVR.

Back on topic -- still waiting to see what other opinions about bulb operation might come forward.

I would recommend the AV mute. I was told that striking the lamp put 2 hours of life gone.

I find the projectors in lounges where they run for 12+ hours everyday seem to last much longer. I just changed a bulb in an inexpensive optima in a lounge that ran for over a year every day and had 13000+ hours on it when we finally changed it cause the picture was very dark.

I would say, the best choice would be to not go with whatever opens the Glasgow art school went with