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Anyone having problem fitting a new lamp in their Hitachi Enclosure? Discount-Merchant.com says I need to remove the little insert from inside the lamp assembly and not use it? Is this accurate?

HunterZ,
What discount-merchant people are telling your is absolutely correct. The Hitachi enclosures (yes all of them) were made originally to fit PHILIPS brand P22 Lamps. As hitachi's first UHP lamp for these TV's was the UX21511 enclosure. Then they followed with the UX21513, UX21517, UX21518, then the later generation Hitachi enclosures were UX21514, UX21515, and UX21516.. and the last generation was the UX25951.

The mold for their enclosure was originally made to fit the Philips P22 lamp is what Discount-Merchant probably sold you. This lamp was then replaced by Hitachi in an effort to save costs of production for the UX21513 with a MATSUHITA (M) lamp which the reflector was a bit different, hence, Hitachi went back and made 2 plastic inserts for their enclosures to fit the Matsushita lamp into their enclosures even though the original design was for the Philips. The matsushita P22 bulb does not have the 4 legs on the outer edges, hence forcing Hitachi manufacturing to insert the plastic adapters to make it fit.

By the time the UX21517 got around, Hitachi was using a percentage of Matsushita lamps and a percentage of the Philips brand lamps, just becasue there was a limit of supply of the Philips brand lamps (although Hitachi decided the matsushita lamp was unrelaible and would give them warranty issues in the future). This is the same time RCA and Samsung started using OSRAM brand lamps inside their TV sets just because the demand vs the supply of the Philips product was much higher. This is when OSRAM actually stepped into the OEM market from the AFTERMARKET market. Philips could not meet demand to produce these lamps (similar to Nintendo and their WII)...

By the time the UX25951 came around (hitachi's latest enclosure)... Philips had resolved their production issues and Hitachi fully switched back to the original Philips product that their TV's were designed to use.

If anyone has a UX25951 enclosure/lamp you can post pictures and I assure you 100% of that model uses the Philips lamp.... a more reliable solution.

In the end, yes, if you remove the 2 plastic "adapters" you will be able to fit your Philips lamp in there perfectly. Your TV should perform just as good or better with the Philips product over the matsushita.