ET-LAD60AW Projector Lamp Hour Limit Bypass

The Panasonic ET-LAD60AW projector bulb is one of the many that has an artificial lamp hour limit on it which is there technically to prevent damage to the projector if the bulb explodes (very rare that this actually happens), but it will often leave a perfectly good bulb as a paper weight. This specific bulb has a limit of 2,000 hours but in my experience, you can easily get another 500-1,000 hours out of it before it just burns out. This mod will only work on a bulb that has not hit its 2,000 hour limit since this will essentially stop it from counting and reset back to where it was before the mod when the projector is power cycled. With this simple mod, you can disable the hour counter on the bulb and save yourself some serious money.

WARNING: Do this mod at your own risk, this bypasses the manufacture’s “safety” mechanism and could cause damage to the projector.

To begin, we need to remove the chip from the projector bulb. The chip we need to access is on the opposite side.

The chip in question is the AT24C32 Serial EEPROM. The way it works is that each hour, the projector will write to the chip and add another number to the counter.

If we take a look at the schematic, there appears to be a pin labeled “write protect”. This is what we are looking for! By default, the WP pin is pulled to GND which allows data to be written to the chip. By simply lifting the pin from the board, and bridging it to VCC, we will disable the chip from being written to.

Easy right? Now reassemble the lamp and pop it back in. If you did it correctly, the lamp hours will reset back to where they were before you did the mod after you power cycle the projector!