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Yes, I tried this with an older Zenith pj that used a 150 watt uhp bulb and failed miserably. After doing research I discovered wattages don't mean jack when comparing an arc bulb to a halogen bulb. Wattage is the amount of energy a device uses, in this case traditional filament bulbs use more power to generate less light, if you catch my drift. In other words a hal bulb using 150 watts will only generate X number of lumens whereas the way more effiecent arc lamp will generate Z number of lumens, which is quite a bit more. I believe this phenomenon is known as a lamps efficacy. If you look up a 150 watt metal halide bulb and 150 watt halogen you'll notice the huge lumen diffrence. We're talking like 2,500 lumens vs about 14,000 for the MH bulb. Its that with which we're concerned about. Before doing this research I had tried to fit a 150 watt hal bulb (actually went to the trouble of carefully drilling out the ceramic "glue" on the old arc bulb, removing the busted arc tube, and reaming out the glass in the neck of the bulb to fit the halogen into the original reflector portion. Reinstalled and hooked directly to the 110v power line (as you don't want to use the original bulb conections since they are subject to several KV at startup and go thru a ballast anyways which is not necessary and will not work w/ a normal filament bulb) and while I had tons of light inside the PJ I coudln't get jack sh** to come out the lens. If I looked down the lens I could see a little square of white faint light, but it wasn't enough enough lumen output to show anything on a piece of paper held 2 inches away from the lens. It basically looked like a normal PJ when its first turned on and the arc bulb has not warmed yet and is very very dim, you just see that little glimmer of light inside the lens. Thats all I got w/ a 150 watt halogen bulb blazing away and baking the insides of the pj, and it got very hot in only a few min.
That was my experience with it, I figured you'd need at least a 1000 watt hal bulb to get enough lumen output and with that your gonna have other issues, such as heat and power requirements mainly to factor in. And of course size and fitting it to the orignal mount, etc. You'd possibly start melting/frying other components. Plus many PJ's won't initialize the rest of the optic electronics until a successful arc is struck and"detected" by the unit. Its just not worth all the hassel for a lamop thats gonna have to be redone every 50 hrs and has a good chance of ruining the pj. I know I looked into it w/ earnest when I found out the cost of the lamps, and quickly found out it wasn't gonna work and was quite disappointed.
Have you tried sites such as lampz.co.uk which will "build on demand" bulbs based on customer requests? I think they can do it sometimes for almost half of what a new full module would cost, that depends on the model.
Sorry this got long,
Jeff
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