Talk of banning Mercury Lamps by 2025, does this effect any DCI projectors out there.

[James Gardiner]

Just wanted to know if anyone has heard of this worldwide pushback on mercury lamps? There are a lot of small cinemas with NC900/1000 and a Barco equivalent out there.
I thought they might be Mercury-based, but a quick Google does not bear fruit in that assumption.
I read recently they are looking to ban them by 2025 in the EU.

Are the lamps in these NEC models affected?

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Projector xenon doesn't have Mercury in them. The xenon lamps containing Mercury are mainly used on the photo engraving business.

[Leo Enticknap]

I don't know, but the NC900 has been out of production for many years and the NC1000 for a few. The 900 in particular becomes unreliable once it gets to 6-8 years old, and then at that point many owners opt to replace them with laser rather than pay for 3-4 hours of tech labor to replace a fan that is buried in the bottom of the chassis. I doubt if there will be many left in service by the end of next year. I've got only one left in movie theater service among my regular customers, and two or three more low hours/light duty units in residence theaters.

In the US, at any rate, the Barco E series sold in infinitesimally small numbers. It was a significantly more expensive than its NEC competitor and added no value.

If this is going to happen, it might be an idea for anyone hoping to keep one of these things in service to stockpile a few sets of lamps, and then plan and fundraise to replace the projector in a couple of years' time.

[Jim Cassedy]

I have heard of the upcoming EU ban. They've got SONY SRX-515 projectors at the venue
I'm at, and each one of them takes 6 mercury bulbs. (Which means that in our large auditorium,
where we use dual projectors for both 2D and 3D, we've got 12 bulbs burning for every show.)

Other than telling management when I'm running low on bulbs, I have nothing to do with the
actual ordering of them- - but the guy who does the ordering sez that 'they are becoming
slightly harder to get" and suggests we stockpile more than we need for now. I've heard
rumors that SONY has stopped manufacturing the bulbs, but I can't confirm that.

The biggest problem I have is getting rid of the dang things. SONY used to provide boxes and
pre-paid labels so that the bulbs could be sent back for disposal or recycling or whatever they
did with them. But since SONY exited the Digital Cinema business, they are no longerdoing that.
We now have dozens of boxes of used mercury bulbs stacked in back-stage waiting for some
sort of disposition. Management said "they are looking into it" but I've never seen any progress.
I' ve done some research and our waste management company will take them away, but we
now have such a load of them, that they charge quite a bit of money to send a special haz-mat
truck out to pick the up and I think management is balking at the extra expense. But the longer
they wait- - the bigger the problem gets. ( I occasionally sarcastically quip that we should just
toss them into San Francisco Bay with all the rest of the mercury that's already there)

Another looming problem for some, is that in January Y2k25, California is going to ban the
sale (and eventual use) of standard tubular fluorescent lights. Yes, I know there are LED
replacement bulbs & fixtures, and I've installed some in my kitchen, but I can think of a few
smaller, older, theaters with lotsa florescent lights that would find converting them all to be
a financial burden.

[Stefan Scholz]

It's been NEC NC 900/ 1000, Barco's 6E and most widely used Sony's 510/515 projectors that came with mercury super high pressure lamps.
The NEC and Barco were not that common, as they were mainly targeted to very small auditoriums, even though I have to admit, there a few
among our clients that were misleadingly sold to uninformed customers by certain installers.
The vast majority of those using mercury vapor were Sony machines, as they were targeted to normal sized auditoriums as well as small ones,
due to the ability to use individual lamp patterns. That is all well known.
With Sony, the situation is likely similar to NEC, these machines are facing a 7 to 10 year operation, and in many the T cores fail these days.
The lamps price just seems to know one direction, a sharp increase in price. The initial pricing was done in a way to match the cost of a Xenon
bulb in the same lumen class. Today, a Xenon lamp is a bargain in comparison. I do not expect that situation to become any better.
With the knowledge of a surely failing T-core, if not failed so far, the best option is to replace the complete machines and buy a semiconductor
RGB projector. Using large DLP and Ultra High Contrast lenses, the image quality equals the Sony. Power consumption and heat loading of the
environment is significantly reduced.
A lot of our clients (mostly small and independent owners) are replacing Sony projectors with RGB semiconductor projectors. None has regretted
so far.

So my expectation, there will not be a lot of mercury projectors left in the field, and for those, manufactures will have stocked the required replacements
for a calculated time in the future, where price increases are foreseeable. It will not be illegal to sell existing lamps for commercial replacement needs.
Just new production will be banned.

[Leo Enticknap]

The biggest problem I have is getting rid of the dang things.

Admittedly that's a bigger problem with mercury discharge bulbs, because of all the gnarly chemistry in them, but it's a problem with xenon arc lamps, too.

I recently was asked to do a site survey for a 15-plex that has been closed since covid, tasked with advising the owners on what needs to happen in the booths to get it back up and running. All the used lamps, in sizes from 3kW to 7, likely since the place first opened, are piled up in a storage room off the side of one of the booths. I stopped counting after 200, and would guess that there are 400-500 there in total, all in their original packaging. To smash 'n trash all of them would take days, and we'll likely need a specialist freight hauler that deals with hazardous waste (because of the broken glass that will be sealed in the boxes) to take them away.

The original projectionists who failed to do this after each bulb swapout (takes 2-3 minutes) have left the owners of that theater with a very time consuming and expensive problem.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Admittedly that's a bigger problem with mercury discharge bulbs, because of all the gnarly chemistry in them, but it's a problem with xenon arc lamps, too.

I recently was asked to do a site survey for a 15-plex that has been closed since covid, tasked with advising the owners on what needs to happen in the booths to get it back up and running. All the used lamps, in sizes from 3kW to 7, likely since the place first opened, are piled up in a storage room off the side of one of the booths. I stopped counting after 200, and would guess that there are 400-500 there in total, all in their original packaging. To smash 'n trash all of them would take days, and we'll likely need a specialist freight hauler that deals with hazardous waste (because of the broken glass that will be sealed in the boxes) to take them away.

The original projectionists who failed to do this after each bulb swapout (takes 2-3 minutes) have left the owners of that theater with a very time consuming and expensive problem.

They'd be better off hiring a person, training him or her how to dispose of them, and having that person do 10 or 12 lamps a day over the course of a couple years as they normally would have done. However, if this is in CA they no doubt have laws that prohibit doing this.

[Leo Enticknap]

Officials from CalSmash have to be present in the room, and sign a form in triplicate confirming that the projectionist is wearing a N95 mask before (s)he is allowed to process each bulb. They will then appear at a press conference in the lobby, boasting about how much glass and cardboard has been recycled to save global warming.

[Rick Cohen]

Tungston is worth $6-7 per lb. Yellow brass is worth $2-3 per lb. Put all the recycleable materials in 5 gallon buckets, and take them to a scrap yard once per week until all the lamps are gone. Or sell the lamps (decompressed) to a scrap person for a few hundred $$ and let them do the work, and get most of the scrap value. There are YouTube videos on how to scrap a Xenon lamp safely for the tungston and brass. I disposed of the glass sealed inside 5 gallon steel popcorn oil buckets. No big deal.

[James Gardiner]

We have quite a lot of smaller cinemas in my region using NC900/1000 projectors. Many expect to get many more years out of the projectors. They are typically not run too hard. So I don't see why not. But if LAMPS are unavailable, that's a different story. I wanted to get a measure of exactly how hard it would be to get a lamp going into the future.
I did a quick Google, and there seem to be many websites selling lamps suitable for those projectors at very inexpensive prices. I also figured that even if banned in the EU, does not mean China or other regions in the world will stop making them.

This is just more issues to add to the pile of difficulties being a small cinema in this era. The resale of these units also just went to the floor with this hanging over them.

Does anyone have knowledge of an official outlook on Lamp availability?

[Leo Enticknap]

Writing as someone working for a dealer that, the last I knew, sold in the high hundreds to low thousands of them a year (though I suspect that this figure has declined a lot in recent years), my co-workers who process these orders have not flagged up any availability issues about these lamps to me as of now. Even during the depths of the covid shutdown (when the high end residence theaters with NC900s were operating a lot more than usual, and went through lamps), there was no problem.

We have quite a lot of smaller cinemas in my region using NC900/1000 projectors. Many expect to get many more years out of the projectors. They are typically not run too hard. So I don't see why not.

The main problem with the NC900 specifically is that the design priority was to pack everything into as small a form factor as possible, and, for the US market, to enable it to be runnable on a consumer 120/60 power supply. It has something like 15 fans in it, that are carefully and intricately positioned within the chassis to manage airflow through the projector. NEC recommend that they all be replaced after 20,000 hours of card cage up time, which is 6-8 hours of tech labor, because the high density component packing means that a lot of disassembly and reassembly is needed. So of course many don't bother. They just reset the fan usage to get their green tail light back, and then eventually the fan underneath the prism assembly borks (in my experience, this is the one that does so most frequently), there is a red tail light, and an emergency tech call to replace it. The disassembly needed to get to it puts this (and many other) jobs outside the capability of even relatively savvy tech owners. It's the projector equivalent of replacing a car's timing belt, which even advanced amateur mechanics are unlikely to want to attempt.

The lamp ballast boards have a habit of failing, too, and again, the design is such that they are not quick or easy to get to.

Not skimping on regular air filter replacements (especially if the air quality in the booth is not great) can help to prevent problems, but the bottom line is that these projectors become very maintenance intensive as they age, and less reliable if this maintenance is not done.

[Marcel Birgelen]

If I read it correctly, the EU ban of all lamps containing mercury will go into effect on January 1st 2026. Keep in mind that a lot of other products containing mercury have already been banned, not just in the EU, but also e.g. in the U.S. Depending on the government we have in the U.S., a general ban on mercury in all "end user products" might be on the table anyway as mercury is a pretty nasty substance.

The global regulations of products containing mercury and the EU ban on mercury lamps has lead to the shutdown of many mercury mines. Mining in the EU has already been banned back in 2003. Those factors have lead to lamp manufacturers across the board to stop producing those lamps, so we're mostly running on remaining stock now.

According to the local law makers, mercury lamps can easily be replaced with alternative technologies like LED. Unfortunately, they're ignoring specific applications like projectors. But even with specific exemptions for such applications, I guess the lamp manufacturers would have an issue getting anywhere near critical volumes to keep producing them.

Unfortunately, this means that operators of affected Sony, NEC and Barco projectors will probably need to look for alternative means of projection. Meanwhile, my advice is to stockpile as much of those lamps as possible, although counter-intuitively, those kind of actions will only further deplete the available stock.

But since all the affected machines have since been EOL-ed and are probably running for 10+ years, the time to think about replacing those machines has come anyway...

[James Gardiner]

Marcel, you make it sound like these projectors will be without lamps in a few years...
I hope you are wrong.... NEC in my region still has some NC1000 run-out units on the books and has been selling them as the only option for the smaller screen market up until just recently when the laser/phosphor unit replacement only just came out. (only months ago). So there are quite a few projectors out there that are very new and were sold with an expectation of lamp availability into the future.
I would expect there is leniency for supply to these expensive units until they meet the expected lifespan. (10 years)

I have some expectations that, even if EU/US are not in a position to make the lamps, other countries will fill the need. Is that an ignorant perspective?

[Leo Enticknap]

It'll be a question of economies of scale: how many of these projectors are in use worldwide, relative to the cost of manufacturing lamps for an ever shrinking market. As others have noted, their price has increased sharply in recent years. If the market is big enough to be profitable, a generic Chinese manufacturer (where, basically, they don't care about environmental issues) may step in and offer knockoff lamps; but to justify the up front cost in tooling, etc., they'd have to be certain of a given volume of sales. And then there would be the question of import restrictions: will the EU, USA, etc. allow them in?

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

The chinese should develop a Laser Lamp replacement for the NC-900's and 1100's. They are small enough that it should be possible to do fairly easily. It could just mount to the lamp side of the projector, replacing the mercury lamps... There is a Chinese fellow on Linked In that sells used D-Cinema equipment and parts, perhaps he'd be the one to approach with the idea..