Do it yourself!

As some of you know, I got a 50 inch rear projection LCD HDTV for my birthday. We went with the projection because they are much cheaper, but the picture is just as good. The only downfall is that you cant hang it on the wall (who cares), and you have to replace the "bulb" ever 2-4 years or so. The nice thing about the bulb type tv is that after replacing the bulb the picture looks as good as new. With Plasma or regular LCD tv's the picture degrades over time.

So anyway, a few weeks back we had a power outage, and when it came back on the tv started telling me I needed to replace the bulb and the picture looked horrible! Its only been 6 months, so we were pretty upset. The cost of the bulb is around $200, and whatever it takes to diagnose/replace it. Well, a normal person would have probably called a tech, or got a new bulb and just replaced it. I am just not one to fork over tons of $$ for something that with a little research could be done yourself. So, I thought... maybe I will pull the bulb out myself and look at it. I was a little reluctant because its an expensive tv, and I didnt want to screw it up and end up ruining it. I pulled the bulb out, and decided it looked fine. So I plugged it back into the tv just to see what would happen, and what do you know! It works fine, and has been ever since! I am guessing that the power outage had somehow tripped an alarm or something and confused the tv, and by resetting the bulb I reset the alarm.

Lesson learned. Dont pay someone to do something you can do yourself. Pay yourself!
By the way, the whole procedure for changing the bulb took about 2 minutes, and could probably be done by a well trained monkey.