Ok, here is my situation. I originally bought the ultimate light kit with the Eballast. It worked for about a month and then the ballast stopped working. I contacted Brain and he graciously replaced it. That one worked for about a day and stopped working as well. I double checked my wiring thinking that was the problem but couldn't figure it out. I was able to get myself one of the huge traditional ballasts with capacitor and it works fine, but now all of my colors are washed out. Questions:

1. This didn't come with an ignitor. Just Ballast and capacitor. Am I missing something?

2. Will going from E-ballast to traditional damage or alter the bulb? Do I need to order a new bulb?

The brightness is the same, but like I said..the colors are extremly washed out. Any comments would be appreciated

Standard ballasts don't need an ignitor and this would only be used to start the bulbs so as its already working you're good.

There isn't anything major different between the coil and eballast they both provide AC current at the required voltage so the bulb shouldn't care if it was working on the other ballast before. The differences between coils and eballasts seem to be that while coil ballast have no active elements so their waveform has to run at the line frequency i.e. 60Hz from the wall plug (50Hz in europe and other parts of the world), while the eballast can run at what ever frequency they want (I beleive that his is usually 1000 to 10,000 Hz) they can also tune the voltage a bit. The higher frequency give the bulb better control (or so the manufactures claim) although different bulbs react better one way or the other.

As usual nothing is simple the website bellow (Aquarium site) tested multiple bulbs on multiple ballasts and found significant differences in brightness and color temp depending on the ballast but some bulbs worked better on coils while others were better or eballast but had different performance on different eballasts. Color temp varies, brightness varies and lifetime varies. They have another report in which multiple people report on brightness over time, some bulbs seem to break in and get brighter then fade over time (1 year continuous) while others faded quicker even two bulbs of the same model. So the bulb to bulb variations can be significant even from the same lot bulb to bulb. As you can see from the plots some parts of the color sepctrum are the same independant of ballast while others vary depending on the ballast so that means that blue may stay the same while red increase which turns blue into purple etc... So the color is dependant on the ballast, but there is no "one right ballast" they are just different.

Bulb and ballast C\omparison

Thanks for the answer. I really dont know what it could be other than the ballast. This bulb has had some rought treatment through the building process of my projector, but it still lights up and is incredibly bright. I just cant figure out why the colors seem so washed out now. All of my corners are bright and the brightness is even throughout the projected image. I even removed my reflector to see if that was the problem, but it didn't change.

I am thinking about just buying a 2nd lamp as a backup and try it out to see if that's the problem or not.

Hook your projector up to your computer if it isn't already and made a pure blue image and see how that looks, repeat with red and green to see that all the colours are coming though fine. I think there is a dead pixel test SW that has been mentioned here that displays all red, all blue etc to find dead pixels but that would work as a good test of color reproduction. The shades could vary with the ballast as mentioned before, but if the bulb is bright as before and white light is made up of all colours there shouldn't be any washed out appearance. Give that a try and see if you can find any issues, check contrast and gamma setting to make sure that they haven't been turned down accidentally and if so just turn them back up.

Colour temperature and uniformity can be affected by frequency, but I'm not sure how that could "wash out" the picture, it would be more likely to just tint it.

I recommend you check your LCD settings. If you left your PJ powered off for ages whilst you got your new ballast, the LCD may have forgotten it's settings. Try increasing the contrast and decreasing the brightness.

Good luck!

I went through all of the LCD settings and they are the same. Brightness is at 100 and contrast is at around 60. Any more contrast and skin tones look very red.
I ordered a new bulb and hopefully it will solve the problem. I'll keep everyone posted on the results of a new bulb