Replacing the Bulb on a UST Projector

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Is your projector flickering? Or has it maybe lost some of it’s former brightness, clairty, or crispness? It may just be that the bulb is going out!

While this may sound like a scary prospect, when my Epson 595 UST began showing these symptoms, I jumped in and replaced the bulb, and brough y'all along for the ride. The good news it, it’s really not scary at all and was actually very easy to replace the bulb!

If you want to watch along as I change mine, you can find the video here:

If you prefer the written route, I’ll try to cover it all here.

The problem:

It all started with a little flickering that happened after my projector was on for a long time and just progressively got worse. So I decided I probably needed to replace the bulb when I felt a bit sea sick just trying to cut out a pattern! I posted on Instagram and got a great tip from a follower to clean out the air filter. I tried but it wasn’t very dirty to begin with and definitely did not help the flickering problem in the least.

Buying a replacement

So I went back to option 2 and ordered a replacement. In ordering, I came to realize that what I wanted to replace was the “lamp” or, in other words, the entire housing, and not actually the “bulb,” which is the actual light bulb and more involved to change.

I searched on both Amazon and eBay for a replacement lamp, using the brand name and model number of my projector (Epson 595 in my case) in the search along with “replacement lamp.” This netted me a few results, which I carefully looked through and compared both the way they looked, the compatible projectors listed, the price, and the shipping. I found what I thought was the best deal on eBay and purchased.

Once the bulb arrived, I took some time to look at it closely and see how it seemed to work. At this point, I still hadn’t opened up the projector and I wanted to be armed with the information about how it probaby went together. A few days later, I was able to film so I set up and started changing the bulb!

First, remove the old lamp

The first step was to remove the cover off the projector and then remove the old lamp. There was one screw in the cover on the projector and two holding in the lamp itself (below).

Close up of the screws you have to remove to remove the lamp.

It was relatively quick and easy to remove and I took a little time to compare the old and new lamp, noting they were very similar but the old one had a kind of patina on the bulb area.

Second, replace with the new one

Then, once I’d very gently cleaned out the lamp housing with a dry cloth, I inserted the new lamp and screwed it in with the same two screws.

The finishing touches

Next, I replaced the cover and tested it out. I immediately noticed the flickering was gone and, what’s more, it was crisper, clearer, brighter, and overall just better than it had been before! I reset the lamp hours so I’d have an accurate count and was ready to recalibrate a bit since I’d moved it out of position.

Conclusion

The entire process took maybe 45 mintues total-finding a new bulb, replacing it, testing, resetting, recalibrating. It was very simple to do and well worth it for how nice the projection looks now!

While I had things going, I actually recorded a couple more videos, so look for those coming soon!

‘Till next time friends,

Branalyn