That much? I'm thinking that my InFocus IN82, which is over a decade old, purchased used and still on the original lamp, is still nearly as bright as when I first got it. Usually when a UHP lamp fails, it turns pink for a day and then fails to strike an arc after that. Happened with the HID lamps on my wife's SUV. Put in new bulbs, but they weren't noticeably brighter than the old ones before they turned pink.
So I'm thinking a new lamp may only give me 10-20% more apparent brightness.
With the contrast maxxed out and all settings set to boost brightness, I get an "acceptable" picture for a 'bat cave' blacked out theater. But even the light from a computer monitor in the back of the room competes with the screen image.
I'm thinking, "how can this thing do HDR, when it isn't even bright enough to do 3D?". I have a studio HDR monitor and I can tell you that looking at peak white on that thing is almost like staring at the sun. This projector's image is like being in the shade after sunset.
While I did manage to fix the cold colors and achieve a better match with my calibrated production monitor after running the automatic calibration procedure, the picture still lacks the punch and "mojo" that the older DLP projector has.
So we have two projectors with a couple thousand hours on them.. one is running strong and the other produces an image that's a strain on the eyes to watch, unless it's an outdoor, sunlit scene, at which point it's passable, but not bright.
When I got this unit, the lamp was on HIGH and all the controls were pushed to the max brightness. I saw a washed-out image at first with no contrast and thought "uh-oh, Sony didn't fix the panel degradation problem". Once I got the contrast right, it was way too dim if there was the slightest ambient light in the room. The light of a cigarette lighter would wash out the picture! I had to shut off everything in the room that has an LCD display to get the room dark enough to see the image from bright to shadow.
If a new lamp quadruples the brightness, then that would probably be acceptable, and I may even be able to operate it in lamp LOW mode for longer life. A mere doubling would be iffy, especially for 3D and absolutely a joke for HDR.
So I'm still on the fence about returning this unit. If a new lamp isn't substantially brighter, then this isn't going to fly well enough on my screen, which has a picture height of 60". Even the color gamut doesn't seem any better than my DLP-based PJ, which surprised me, given all the hoopla over HDR and the (so far) nonexistent REC.2020 (can't find anything but REC.709 and a bunch of 'custom' slots on the colorspace menu. I shoot in a color space that exceeds REC.2020 by quite a margin, so a wide gamut projector is fairly important to display the intense reds, violets, greens and blues, etc. When anything with aggressive color is in the picture, the VW675 crushes the color detail, while it's perfect on the production monitor. For instance, a red sweater in one of the scenes I shot appears flat red, shifted a little orange on the PJ, but on the production monitor, the fabric texture is clearly there and the red is much more intense. The PJ mutes those intense colors.
I'm seriously hoping against all hope that the replacement lamp the vendor is sending me will fix these problems. If this is how the VW675 really is, then I need a LASER based PJ with no less than 5000 lumens. Realistically, to do HDR, probably 20,000 lumens is required to produce a convincing 10-12 f/stops of D range on the screen. But for a PJ that costs 15 grand, I expected it to be substantially better than the aging IN82 that has been serving me well all these years. I just need 17:9 and DCI 4K and a wider lens to fill up my screen, but I don't want to give up the brightness and punch of the DLP.