The following was instigated by a feeling of guilt about watching TV on the projection system rather than one of the other TVs in our house. (We are retired and use HD-DVRs to time shift everything we watch.)
Assume a useful lamp life of 3000 hours for our Sony VPL-50 Pearl, a cost of $300 for a lamp, and an average of 8 hours operation daily. Rounding down the useful life to a year yields a lamp cost of $25 a month. Adding a $25 reserve to the $125 a month we pay DirecTV doesn't seem like an unreasonable added expense. If you instead assume 2500 hours of useful life, the cost is $30 a month, IMO still not an unreasonable cost.
db
Assume a useful lamp life of 3000 hours for our Sony VPL-50 Pearl, a cost of $300 for a lamp, and an average of 8 hours operation daily. Rounding down the useful life to a year yields a lamp cost of $25 a month. Adding a $25 reserve to the $125 a month we pay DirecTV doesn't seem like an unreasonable added expense. If you instead assume 2500 hours of useful life, the cost is $30 a month, IMO still not an unreasonable cost.
db