Epson EH-TW550 projector no longer powering up properly

[glymph]

Hi folks,

I have an Epson EH-TW550 which has been working perfectly for about 10 years, and it suddenly turned itself off yesterday whilst watching something. It appeared to have overheated (flashing red power LED), so I unplugged it and left it over night. It still didn't power up the next morning, so I unplugged the lamp unit and plugged it back in again, and it powered up ok once and the image appeared to be fine. With subsequent attempts to power the unit on from cold, it spins the fan slowly for a couple seconds then fast and the green LED flashes (apparently this is normal during initialisation, but that used to just take a few seconds) - it never gets beyond this point.

Do the lamps on these units fail like this, or is it more likely something else is happening? Have I reached some time limit that I need to reset on the unit, perhaps? Since the fan is working fine, I doubt replacing it will help, but that's certainly a lot cheaper than getting a new lamp. If I'm going to do that, I may as well pay a little more and get a new projector to be certain, although it would be a shame to waste an otherwise working projector.

Any suggestions most welcome.

thanks