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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?
When the OLED's come out!
;)
Perhaps the cheapest laptop LCD screens are being sold at a loss, and the desktop ones are sold at a high profit?
Just a random guess.
Sure, there are some legitimate questions here, but if you and others take their business elsewhere, prices will eventually fall.
Consider how many LCD's that IBM buys for their ThinkPads, compared to mom and pop.
When you think about it like that, we should consider ourselves lucky that our LCD's dont cost more than they already do.
The subject is probably the answer. If people are willing to pay the current prices for the convenience of a flat LCD monitor to recoup deskspace then the price may very well be fair. I'm considering the same to replace my son's 17" Trinitron on his desk because it's huge and takes up too much room to give him space to work. The flat screen LCD would work perfectly. I suppose you could say "Price fixing" with the the apparent disparity between the LCD monitor and the total cost of a laptop -- but it's really comparing apples to oranges. Each have separate markets.
-- Rick
Many of the laptop makers either own their own monitor factories (Like Sony) or get incredible volume discounts doing their own importing (say, Dell).
Items that don't sell well in "retail" channels get a much higher mark-up to make up for the small volume. The same item in lots of 1000 or more over and over again will sell dirt cheap. Ever noticed the price per 1000 of your favorite cpu when it comes out?
It's a bit of a catch-22. When customers buy more via retail channels, the prices will come down. When the prices come down, customers will buy more...
Eventually the retailers will get there trying to compete with each other, but with "most" (me and you not among them) customers are perfectly happy with what's out there now, there isn't enough demand for a big retailer to start stocking larger quantities and begin the price death spiral we've grown to know and love about computer parts.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I might be willing to hand over the big bucks for one of the bigger flat-panel displays, but to do so I would have to accept a number of dead pixels in the bargain. For instance, there's the Samsung 240T which goes for about $3,000, regardless of whether the thing has dead pixels or not.
Why aren't the 240T's with, say, eight dead pixels sold at a different price? I understand the issues with the manufacturing of these displays, that if they were to reject all but those without dead pixels the cost would be prohibitively expensive, but why can't they just count the number of dead pixels and set a price accordingly.
Monitors are important; I end up looking at the thing most of the day for work and for play, I am willing to pay a premium for a very fine display. But to risk getting one with a bunch of dead pixels right in the middle of the screen, I mean, that would just suck really, really bad.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
I think you have that backwards
Prices rise as demand increases relative to supply and fall as demand decreases. So by that logic LCD computer screens should be cheaper and laptop displays more expensive.
... that the people that produce and distribute LCDs are the same people that sell CRTs
As soon as the majority of CRTs that are already produced are sold, the prices on LCDs will drop
Just a couple more cents of mine
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I tend to agree... except that we said that before SODIMMs were standardized. We said that before mini-pci became common. We even said that before ACPI actually worked. Standizing laptops wholesale would never work, but they do seem to be approaching some reasonable interoperability in many ways.
I've had this sig for three days.
Further, it's not an apples and apples comparison. The laptop vendors buy wholesale, in comparatively huge volumes, lots of different sizes all at once, and likely committing to purchase volumes over time. IMHO those combine to drive the price way below what the average LCD monitor guy is selling.
Come to think of it, something similar is going on with memory, processor and disk prices. Take your average laptop, price those components separately, and I'll be you find something that seems to be price gouging for all of them.
They're maximizing their profits. That's what companies in a market to. They'll charge an amount such that (sales * (price - cost)) is a maximum. They're greedy capitlists. It's what they do. They're not out for charity. If you don't like it, don't buy them. Wait for the market to be saturated.
What's that I hear? It's the redundant and troll mods. Oh, well, I've had good karma for too long.
Danish != nationality
I hate to reply to my own comment, but regarding the price similarities between a laptop and a stand-alone LCD. For $1000 you aren't going to get a laptop with a good screen (or a good anything else, really). Not with a wide viewing angle, good resolution resampling, etc...
My Presario cost me $1500 in 2000, and its display is horrible. Resampling is simple pixel-doubling, which is impossible to read. Viewing angle is on the order of 15-degrees (possibly exagerated, but it's pretty bad). Backlight never turns off until it's powered down (no display standby). And of course it's only 13.3 inches.
Compare that to a $650 Samsung a friend bought, also in 2000: 15-inch, decent (better) viewing angle, analog connection, etc. Not to mention the $400 Microtek I mentioned above.
I think if you shop around, and compare feature-for-feature, you'll find that the situation isn't really that bad. Find a laptop with a 15-inch display and good features. Now find that $1000 one you mentioned; there's going to be a lot of differences.
Finally, televisions are a different beast. You need hardware to handle scan-conversions, TV reception, composite/S-video conversions, etc. There's just more to it. Plus, I'd imagine (I haven't looked) that an LCD television would support HDTV or, at least, high-resolution inputs (game consoles, PC, DVD?)
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Prices are set by demand. If a manufacturer/seller can sell LCDs for $1000, they will. And if they can sell them for more as TVs, they will. If they're forced to sell them for less when combined with a laptop, they will.
I'm always shocked when I hear complaints like this. Doesn't any school teach even basic economics anymore?! Why are such simple concepts so confusing for so many people?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
The prices of flat panel LCDS, and HDTV's are fscking ridiculous! When they get to $300 let me know......
I'm not sure you understand- price fixing is *exactly* the situation as described. You see, when manufacturers fix prices, all the manufacturers collude to set prices far above fair market value. In the modern world, they feel they can get away with it because if someone tries to undercut them they can revoke licenses and sue for patent infringement.
The point he's making is that this is a corruption of capitalism, and that the situation you're describing- lowered prices- is not occurring because of illegal collusion among competitors. This is encouraged in Japan (for an excellent fictional discussion of the topic, see Michael Crichton's novel "Rising Sun"), but frowned on in the United States. Unfortunately, stupid patent laws and unenforced hole-filled antitrust laws are what make this possible.
If I remember right, Sony and other manufacturers of CD based music just lost a lawsuit for falsely inflating the prices of CDs. Maybe there is something similar going on with the flatscreen business. As long as people keep buying at these high prices, they will continue to have high prices.
Another thing to think about, though, is the vast quantities that laptop manufacturers purchase in order to keep the prices down. It's kinda like Windows. A bundled version probably cost 2/3 what a shelf copy costs (or less, I'm not sure).
You are all missing the point. This is not about finding a LCD that is the same size as your laptop screen, it's about finding one that has the same size and resolution. The dell inspirion i am writing this on is a 15 inch (viewable) lcd running with a native res. of 1600x1200. A quick scan of compusa.com revealed no lcd screens with those specs.
The closest i found was a 19 inch CTX lcd that runs at 1600x1200 but costs 1059.
The new inspirion 8500 comes with a 15.4 (widescreen) lcd that runs with a native res. of 1920x1200.
At compusa i would have to spend 2000 dollars to get a lcd with the same res.
BUNNY OF DEATH!
That doesn't sound like much of a plan...it sticks you with drinking that swill instead. Maybe you should grab a dorm fridge (or maybe even one of those desktop fridges that ThinkGeek sells, if they work at all) for your office/cube/whatever if you have a chronic problem with people swiping your stuff from the breakroom.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
The best thing about LCD's is that the display is perfect with a DVI input. Perfect pixel alignment, and no analog artifacts. LCD + VGA is almost worse than CRT + VGA, since analog errors look a LOT worse on a digital display.
Alas, i do a lot of video testing, so I need a display that is analog resizable - a CRT. But that analog noise in VGA always worries me, since it's hard to prove what image errors are due to compression, and which are due to the cable. So, what I want is a DVI CRT! Something like a LaCie ElectronBlue 22".
Anyone making anything like that. I don't mind if it's significantly more expensive than a normal monitor.
My video compression blog
Indeed, I can imagine ... and what's the point?
Well, in this case it doesn't sound like you're using the "fun" part of your imagination. People make low-rider bicycles for crying out loud. People will mod anything they can because it's a chance at practical application of their imagination. To many that's "fun." So as to your question about the point being, the point is to have fun trying it.
Not to mention, not just use imagination in some kind of applicable way, but actually create something new for the sake of trying. Lots of good things have come out of imagination, like creativity.
--SuperBug