Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Lamp house options

This is topic Lamp house options in forum Film Handlers' Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Garry Knapp (Member # 9697) on 02-11-2017, 07:40 PM:

Without getting into huge high-voltage systems, are there other options for lamp houses? Perhaps not so large?

Posted by Dave Macaulay (Member # 813) on 02-11-2017, 08:10 PM:

How large is your screen? that is the main decider for lamp power required.
I'm not sure what you mean by "high voltage". There are lower wattage xenon lamp power supplies that run on standard single phase power, although usually you need to wire a circuit with 220/240/208V. You need 3 phase power for pretty much any xenon lamp supply over 2000W or so.
The simplest/best film light source is a xenon lamphouse (ignoring - for many good reasons - carbon arc lamps).
They are fairly easy to find used and cheap.
Xenon lamphuoses and power supplies are (were?) standard, simple, mount easily to US made projectors (and some "foreign" ones), and give the light spectrum that films were timed for.
For a small home screen you can adapt a different light source like tungsten or LEDs ... expect image colours to be a bit weird and eliminating hotspots or dark areas might be a problem. I've had a decent result from gutting a slide projector to transplant the lamphouse parts into a 35mm film projector lamphouse for a small home screen.

Posted by Garry Knapp (Member # 9697) on 02-11-2017, 08:34 PM:

Hi and thank you for the info. I have a very small setup here.
The distance to my screen is only about 12ft. my screen is about 7ft across. I'm running a vic5. I thot about stealing from another projector, but which one? I tried using a slide projector and just held it up to the aperture, but that was futile...tried creating my own....even more futile...
I guess by high-voltage i meant those large rectifier based units. I'm fine with something that would use 240v...

Posted by Michael Lattavo (Member # 9457) on 08-25-2017, 06:08 PM:

Gary - did you ever come up with a solution?

Posted by Garry Knapp (Member # 9697) on 08-28-2017, 03:53 PM:

I did...
I acquired a small ORCON lamphouse and converted it to run on a 400w halogen bulb. Its all up and running great now [Smile]

You can see it on youtube. Look for 'setting up a 35mm at home'