Sharing Projector Lamps, Trying to Compete.

The CP-11T was a short lived projector that the Boxlight Corporation introduced back when the decade was young and terrorism seemed a distant and foreign problem. Around that time also, Boxlight had a much larger share of the market. It was a time before a lot of the big name consumer electronic companies had moved into the now crowded DLP and LCD projector market. Boxlight it seemed was destined to rise above the projector market jungle and become a niche brand name that everyone had to have. Ah but alas, Boxlight like so many other smaller companies has waned in the past few years. Perhaps companies like these no longer have the flood of resources to research and develop mighty products that are on the cutting edge of the markets technology.

Boxlight tried to cut costs so that they could compete with the big names. For instance, the projector lamp inside the CP-11T unit is manufactured by Philips in Japan and is used in 18 different projectors. The plethora of projectors that share lamps is not limited to the Boxlight brand name either; 6 distinct projector brands use the exact same projector lamp and module inside their units.

This strange phenomenon of sharing the parts in consumer electronics products with high price tags is not totally uncommon, but it is rare. Consumer electronic manufacturers often can procure parts for their expensive products by spending mere pennies on the dollar overseas.

So, why do so many companies share projector lamps? One reason for the strange cooperation amongst fierce competitors such as Canon and Sanyo is probably the exorbitant cost of projector lamps themselves.

Projector lamp technology, as most people know who have been following the News and Reviews right here on myprojectorlamps.com, is budding and young. The typical projector lamp is a sort of mutant evolution of the more traditional metal halide lamp. It also involves setting up a high-pressure ARC tube that contains potentially deadly mercury vapor. Both these factors combine to make the manufacturing of projector lamps an expensive endeavor. And the fact that they are made in Japan, probably doesn’t help things too much from cost analysis perspective.

In all likelihood these total competitors share projector lamps because they are just that total competitors - and absolute competitors absolutely need the most cost effective methods to stay in business.