I've been an avid reader for many years and although I don't post often, I appreciate all the others who post on these boards.

My problem is that I have a two year old Samsung HL-5078W DLP television. When I first got the TV, the picture was great, didn't matter whether it was cable or DVD player, both gave me outstanding pictures that competed more than favorably with the plasma I had in the bedroom. Recently however, dark scenes on my Samsung are very grainy with no detail on blacks and dark greens and in normal scenes, blacks are blotchy and grainy. It doesn't matter the source, either the cable box (SA 8300HD) or the Oppo 981 DVD player. Both are connected via HDMI cables. Has anyone else experienced this problem? Do I just need to replace the lamp or do I have some other issues?

DLP's have a side effect of dithering blacks...its just one of the things that is inherent to the technology of a spinning color wheel..if you are seeing "grainyness" on the DLP you may need to adjust your brightness control.

Fire up a dark scene and see if you can make the blotchyness (or dithering) go away by lowering brightness. If you have to lower it so low that you lose tons of detail in the scene, then you could very well need a new lamp.

I am going to bank lamp here......