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LCD Price Fixing?
bilsaysthis asks: "Bill Kearney poses a really interesting question, one which I've been puzzled by for a while too: 'What's with prices on LCD displays? On one hand a laptop can be had with UXGA resolution display for $1000. Try buying that display alone and you'll find it's also around $1000. Then there's how much they're gouging for the same resolution in an LCD television.'" Sadly enough, as much as I want one of these for my wall, the market is willing to bear these prices. How long will it be before this hardware becomes affordable?
I setup a mirror (posted as AC to avoid karma whoring, I have better things to do with my time). You can read the article
here, once it's slashdotted.
March 30, 2003
/. to see if any good answers come up. Who knows if it will get posted though, since none of my previous submissions have been.
:)
LCD price fixing?
What's with prices on LCD displays?
On one hand a laptop can be had with UXGA resolution display for $1000. Try buying that display alone and you'll find it's also around $1000. Then there's how much they're gouging for the same resolution in an LCD television.
There are, of course, manufacturing yield issues with LCDs. The bigger you make them, the harder it becomes to make one free from defects. But look at the price differentials between OEM panels in laptops vs that of standalone monitors. The disparity is quite wide. Balancing (subsidizing) one market on the backs of another is not a new thing. But it seems a reach to use that as justification for the LCD montior/TV prices.
So what's going on here? Are the monitor manufacturers pulling a fast one here? Are they gouging consumers? And why are they priced so similarly across the board?
# | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) | 03:47 PM
Comments (scroll down to see all 3 comments...)
Hope it's okay but I submitted this to
Posted by: BillSaysThis on March 30, 2003 07:04 PM
It's been posted! I'm a slashdot subscriber and I see that this story has been posted, it will be up probably within 20 minutes
Posted by: Zach on March 31, 2003 08:35 PM
Brace yourself, here it comes. Its on slashdot, or will be in a few minutes. Hope you've paid you bandwidth bill!
Actually, as I am going to say on slashdot, a lot of it has to do with supply vs demand. There are a LOT of laptops sold, but comparitvily, not many standalone LCD screens. It does require some more work to make a LCD screen accept VGA or RCA input.
Posted by: Zaffle on March 31, 2003 08:39 PM
Supply and demand. Get used to it.
:)
But seriously, prices are dropping. I just got a Viewsonic VX900 19 inch LCD monitor for $723 (including taxes) at BestBuys. Of course, I took advantage of their 10% off deal + $100 rebate.
eTrade SUCKS
It's not really price-fixing proper, just basic economics.
Username taken, please choose another one.
I ran into this same question when I was made responsible for parts ordering for my company. I was told at the time by the manufacturer rep (Toshiba, I think) that some sort of tariff was responsible. LCD's connected to computers were not charged the tariff, LCD's separate were charged. This was the reason given to us why LCD's ordered for broken laptops costs as much as a new one.
This was 1995, and the answer comes from a sales guy, so YMMV.
-G "We love to buy books, because we are buying the belief we have time to read them" - Warren Zevon
The prices of LCDs has been steadily getter lower over the past few years. Even if prices seem a little inflated, it's not comparable to something like music CD prices, which have actually gone UP over the years. LCDs are becoming more attainable for the masses at this point, I don't see too much to complain about in this market. Wait for OLEDs and other (competiing) flat-screen technologies to become widely available, and we'll see what happens to LCD prices. Regarding the UXGA available for $1000 remark, it would seem the desktop market is devoid of models that offer greater than 1280x1024 resolution, even on large 19" LCD models - this makes laptop displays more attractive, which is unusual when comparing the possibilities on desktops vs. laptops.
But can you imagine an open laptop?
Yes. Big, bulky, heavy, ugly, power-hungry, hot as hell, slower than other "non-open" competitors and still with few selections for parts, maybe slightly more than proprietary designs.
An open laptop is an often brought up idea and it is idiotic.
You have no idea what it takes to design a good laptop.
How long has it been since you examined prices on LCD displays?? A 15" Samsung SyncMaster 152B can be had for roughly $450US, and I doubt your $1000 notebook has a screen this good. (And I see various 17" models price at $600)
I've been researching info regarding using laptop LCDs with a PC, because I want to build a portable PC. One thing I discovered is that the connector on your monitor is essentially analog, whereas the signal in the video card is digital. A laptop can drive the digitial display directly with a digital signal, using LVDS (Low Voltage Differential Signaling) or a similar proprietary standard. Stand-alone LCD monitors take an anlog signal from your PC and convert it to digital. Not only do you have the cost of D/A and A/D conversion, you also have power consumption associated with this.
The prices on the "controllers" that allow you to drive an LCD from a standard VGA connector are around $200 as separate items, mostly because they are low demand specialty items. Such controllers are integrated into stand-alone monitors, and economies of scale keep them from adding too much to the bottom line.
So, while there is some justification for the increased cost of stand-alone displays, I tend to agree that the controller, case, and associated parts don't explain the entire difference.
I'm less bothered by the prices, and more bothered by the fact that low-power technology is simply not available. For that matter, the entire laptop industry is full of artificial controls. However, it's encouraging to note that you can at least get laptop form-factor hard drives. Given time, I think some of the other tight controls will break down too, and we will start to see "screwdriver shops" building laptops from commodity parts. I eagerly anticipate the day that happens, as much as every incumbent laptop maker dreads it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The comparison in price really isn't a fair comparison. A $1000 laptop only has a 12 inch screen. An LCD TV needs to be larger than that. I wouldn't want to hang a 12 inch LCD screen on my wall to watch TV.
I don't know if this effects the big-number LCD manufacturers, but it is a good reason. There is now more support for all-digital video cards, but it would be market suicide to become known as "that LCD manufacturer whose products aren't compatible with any of our old systems".
Sure. But last time I checked the expensive bit for LCD screens wasn't just the # of pixels you cram on the screen, but the size too. UXGA, like the original thread discusses, is a pixel count, and doesn't take size into account.
I seriously doubt that the two items under question @ $1000 aren't going to have the same LCD part inside them.
LCDs are digital. Adding in circuitry to go analog->digital (VGA, with ALL the bizarro resolutions that it implies) or even traditional external DVI (with it's ability to drive long cable runs, unlike the typical short runs required inide a laptop) costs money.
Implementing straight VGA is kinda tricky because the conversion has to scale the signal up to the LCD's native resolution on-the-fly. With DVI (any form) the video chipset can handle this duty (and usually does a pretty good job of it), with VGA the entire onus is on this piece of hardware. Install a cheap piece of hardware and that expensive screen looks like crap - good luck selling them.
'course this is just my opinion, and probably an outdated one at that.
Moof!
Prices are being somewhat fixed as the LCD industry is "getting their commodity while they can" much as the memory industry did years ago. The memory industry has learned that volume is the better equation, thus, the low memory prices. OLEDs will change this because they are much cheaper to produce, much brighter and much thinner. Kodak already has OLEDs with Palm soon to follow in a new color Zire from ramblings on the net as well as Apple computer for a new device yet to be announced.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Notebook screens differ from desktop LCD's in that,
* Their viewing angle is usually a lot worse
* Their contrast ratio and brightness is usually worse
* They're smaller by at least an inch or two
* Their response times are generally a lot slower
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
That's not how I remember my economics. You have your basic supply/demand curve, with price on the Y axis, and units on the X. As price goes up, more units can be supplied, so the supply curve has an increasing slope. Conversely, there is more demand as price drops (units become more affordable). In other words, the demand curve has a decreasing slope. In ascii art (please let this look decent ...):
Price is always determined by the demand curve, with the supply curve denoting how many units can be built at a given price. If the price is high, the demand is low, and although many units can be supplied at that price, that's only theoretical -- nobody's buying, so there's no money to manufacture those units. There are always the economincally-enabled few that can afford anything at any price, and the bleeding-edge early adopters that will pay a premium for being the first on the block, but most people won't buy until the price has dropped. When the two cross, you're at the optimum price (for a non-monopolistic competitive market). After that point, more units can't be supplied because the sales won't cover costs, and before that point fewer people will buy because the price is too high. This is where you get into loss-leader (selling to the right of the optimum point, below cost, to generate more demand) and monopoly (selling to the left of the optimum point, because nobody can compete with you to keep your prices down -- there's a point where the price is high enough to allow others into the market, but so long as the monopoly keeps the price below that point, it's got the market to itself).Now, what the original poster was suggesting (I believe -- and if not, it's what I'm suggesting) is that laptop LCDs are being sold at a price on the demand curve to the right of the optimum point (lower price), but the manufacturers can afford to do so by selling non-laptop LCDs (desktops, TVs) at a price on the demand curve to the left of the optimum point. If things are ideal, the merged graph should come out with the combined demand and supply crossing properly at the averaged price. I doubt that's the case. It's likely that the price is higher than that, but it shouldn't be by much -- if it were, then competitors would lower their prices to gain more marketshare.
And just to CMA, it's been 3-ish years since I've had an economics course, so my analysis may be off, but my graph (ugly as it is) should be correct for a baseline S/D graph.
$1000 for a 15" lcd? where are you shopping? I'm not sure your numbers add up - most people can get a 15" lcd for around 300. Of course the price seems to go up exponentially with size.
For this 18" panel retail is $599, the university's price is $480, and cost is in the neighborhood of $375. About a 60% retail markup.
In comparison, a 19" CRT retails for $249, discounted is $211, and cost is around $205. About a 20% markup.
I don't expect the huge markup to end anytime soon, everyone is picking them up like hotcakes regardless.
It was established in 1991, removed in 1993...and it applied only to components, not finished products, if I read it correctly:
http://www.wtec.org/loyola/displays/c2_s1.htm
Please help metamoderate.
I've bought plenty of 12-packs of Diet Coke for $1.99. I consider anything below $2.50 to be a good sale price for a 12-pack. I do suspect that the store is actually paying more that $2 for the product and using it as a loss leader.
What I notice is that the really good deals at one store tend to alternate between Coke and Pepsi. One week Coke will be cheap, the next week it'll be Pepsi.
Random tip: If you're stuck buying your own soda for work, go with Diet Pepsi. Your scumbag coworkers will steal other peoples' Diet Cokes and/or sugary stuff first before they pilfer your pop.
Well, sure there is markup with monitors but you have to realize there are probably way more displays made for laptop sizes (12-15in) then there are for desktops (15-21+). If they make less of the larger displays and they cost more per display because investment in manufacturing. So of course they are going to cost more because there aren't as many made. Finally, on the tv displays, the flat panel displays are plasma which is a phosphorous based display. These aren't the same as the tfts in pc monitors so it is comparing apples and oranges.
Hi,
I have to remain anonymous or my boss will kill me.
I regularly order 50K+ units of TFT montiors, LCD TV, etc.
The market price fluctuates for a number of reasons:
1. Demand - ordering patterns of standalone monitors change season by season. For example, a glut of orders after Chinese New Year caused a worldwide shortage in March, with higher resultant prices
2. Raw material availability - motherglass is only produced by 2 manufacturers worldwide. If they squeeze production or undersupply, then LCD prices rise.
3. Shipping and insurance costs increase with war, pestilence and famine. March has been particularly bad this year.
4. The manufacturers (mainly in China and S. Korea) are opportunists who will use the above points to increase their margins. Despite factory audits, price pushing still goes on and some comapnies are known to collude on prices.
To be fair, when you take into account points 1 to 3, the manufacturers do have to offset fluctuations against average prices.
The difference between laptop prices and monitors is simply a matter of the size of production run and the power of the bulk laptop buyers.
Expect prices to rise as Bush proves just what a criminal he really is in the Middle East and beyond.
If Perle etc. move against North Korea, a lot of the world's production capacity is going to be severely affected.
As if that is the only problem with dropping bombs on innocent people!
For about $1500, you can get a cheap P4 laptop with a 15" UXGA screen. Sure, the laptop itself is huge, bulky, and hot, but the screen itself is wonderful. There are only two companies that make 15" UXGA displays, Hitachi and Sharp. Both screens are excellent quality. They're sold under the brand-name "UltraSharp" (Dell) and "Flexview" (IBM) in mainstream laptops.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I agree, it all has to do with competition, or in this case a lack of competition.
:-) mass-scale LCD factory outside of the Far East. For the geographically less developed folks (those that think that Netherlands is the capital of Denmark :-), this means no company in the US or Europe. Please think a second of the consequences, like the US having to rely on Japanese GPS technologies.
In 1992/94 I worked for Philips in the Netherlands to build the first (and last
At that time, Philips (world leader in CRTs and TVs) saw it as a threat that the possible successor of this product (LCD's) was built nowhere in the Western World. However, three years later they solved this in a differnt way by making an alliance with LG.
But, the important part is that no US manufacturer (Motorola, Intel, Zenith, RCA, etc.) has started LCD plants, and no European company (Siemens, Thompson, etc.) has done it either. That's asking for being dependent on only a very small group of companies, mainly in South Korea and Japan, that can very easy make a deal and keep prices up.
So, it's easy to say: We need competition. Someone must start that competition, even when you are the David against Goliath. Same is true with the MS domination of this world. Yes, it keeps the prices up, but you (the custumer) asked for it when you swapped your WordPerfect for Word4Windows.
So, when all that has happened, don't complain later!!!
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
Yes, but try finding a good way to get TV on the laptop. So far, I haven't found any (granted, I haven't really looked in the past month or two). All of the TV tuners are either old PCMCIA ones or USB ones (lacking the bandwidth to have decent picture). The only solution I have found is to buy an expensive analog-DVI (firewire) adapter and a separate TV tuner.
Strangely though, the ghosting was unnoticeable with movies, but here another annoyance came up: in a dark room, playing a dark movie (e.g. Alien), the supposedly black bars on the top and at the bottom of the screen are annoyingly bright, so bright that it's really distracting. Yes, I tested all kinds of different monitor settings, and I know that this is a problem all LCDs have, but it still sucks.
I'm a bit baffled, as this LCD has a high-class PVA panel and is supposedly one of the best 17" LCDs currently available. The picture quality is really great, but there are some big drawbacks.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
Samsung makes some great displays in varying sizes that combine video and PC inputs (some even have a TV tuner built in with a remote control). I have used a 170MP for a year now and it has worked flawlessly (17" LCD with built-in TV tuner and remote control). These units are FAR less money than the equivalent LCD TV: just doing a quick search at pricewatch.com brought up the the 170MP for $450 shipped (CompuHQ.com), and you can use it as a PC monitor!.
Tom's Hardware recently had a good article summarizing manufacturer's policy's regarding dead pixels:
l
www.tomshardware.com/display/20030319/index.htm
Coca Cola isn't in charge of vending machine prices. I see them as low as $0.45. There are three reasons I can think of for the higher price per can. (in order of importance)
1: If you're at a vending machine, you have no other option. You're forced to buy it or be thirsty.
2: You're not buying in bulk. It's a lot easier to give 1 person 100 cans than to give 100 people each 1 can.
3: The machine costs money to operate. Refrigerators use a lot of energy, plus they have to pay the salary of the person who stocks the machine.
All of these arguments apply to LCDs as well, as does the different in price you see in single Coke cans. Just as you can get a can of coke for anywhere from 50 to $1, you can get the same LCD for about $250-$500 depending on where you shop. Some places will give you a better deal than others, but nobody will give you the deal that Dell gets. They probably pay no more than $150 each. (going by analogy; in reality I have no idea)
I was just shopping this week for a third LCD screen. I already have a 17" Apple and a 15" NEC.
I found a Mag 14" for $150 after rebate at Best Buy!
Also at Best Buy: A off-name 17" LCD for $350. I paid close to $900 for my 17" LCD only a year ago. You can now pick up a 17" Samsung for $400!
Prices are definitely falling.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
My laptop took a fall and the screen cracked. It did not completely break as I can see most of it (there are some black splots). Compaq will not fix the screen for less than $999.95. Seems strange cuz the screen was lower end, and you can buy 17 inch LCDs for $250 after shipping charges on the Internet.
Unfortunately, Compaq will not even sell the part for me to fix. So I'm pretty much screwed. I figure I will buy a $250 LCD (standalone not mount-on-laptop), and just connect my *new desktop* to it. I can take the laptop around if I need to but the screen looks like shit.
Short economics lesson: the price you pay is determined by the supply curve AND the demand curve. Company A is not going to sell you that cheap toolset (they bought from china for $1) for less than $10 because that is what the market will bear. They could sell it at $2 and still make a profit, but that profit would not be adequate to keep them running, because shareholders expect what is called an economic profit: they would rather invest in company B which pays a decent dividend because it sells the toolset for $10.
I would be willing to bet that large stocks of CRTs are not an issue and that R&D is pretty minimal. After all we've had CRTs for 60 years or so.
>If coke started selling 12packs for $2.00 what >would pepsi do? They would have to compete to >survive. Of course Coke can't do that cause they >will lose money
Coke would probably not lose money since I suspect the manufacturing/disbn cost of a can of soft drink is than 17c. The point is they would not make _enough_ money.
The problem comes when there are small numbers of suppliers: collusion is the natural tendency. Theoretically if the profits resulting from this collusion are great enough (ie prices are high enough) more players will enter the market and break the cartel. However there are clearly barriers to entry: setting up a plant is a very expensive business.
Collusion may not be overt: it could be simply that neither side really challenges on price.
The question is how many technology items are affected by collusion. DO you pay too much for your processor: how many makers can you choose from? Do you pay too much for your word processing softare: how many suppliers can you choose from?
Little bobby wants to know: "What is the difference between price gouging and price fixing?"
Price fixing: all the stores in town get togather and have a meeting and decide that everyone will sell 15" LCD monitors fo $299. The consumer is screwed.
Price gouging: You break the screen in your laptop and the repair center says (after taking it appart), "what's on the hard drive." You say, "my only copy of last year's books." The repair clerk says, "That will be $1759, plus labor." The consumer is hog tied and gang raped.
The important thing: to remember - either way consumers get screwed.
-- $G
I work designing LCD controllers. This one is really easy to answer.
1. Size matters. The costs of an LCD 'glass' like a chip die rise rapidly with physical size. Not only do you get less from a given blank but your yield falls too.
2. UXGA stand-alone displays are expensive to control. The market demands a big display act like a CRT even if it isn't. This means you need to be able to do frame-rate conversion, which because UXGA panels are highly timing sensitive requires a fancy low-volume high-cost controller IC with an SDRAM frame buffer. High-speed AVI and DVI interfaces cost too.
3. Laptop displays ain't as good colourwise or luminance wise!
4. The base cost means low volume means even more cost...
In short, forget price gouging. A UXGA laptop display is simply much much cheaper to manufacture than a standalone UXGA panel.