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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?
We need an open laptop form factor...
Three requirements:
- Chassis spec
- DC power supply spec
- LCD spec
It sparked in my mind when I broke the LCD on my thinkpad... IBM wanted $900 to fix it but I was able to disassemble one of their desktop models and get the component that I required for less than $300...
Sheesh...
But can you imagine an open laptop? Neon and clear shit for days... Case modding to the extreme!
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A lot of it has to do with the old story of supply and demand. There is a very large call for LCDs for laptops, and the laptop manufacturers get them at almost cost, then intergrate them into the laptops.
However, there isn't much (comparitivly) demand for LCD computer screens, or even worse, TV screens.
When I was in singapore a few years ago, RCA input LCD screens weren't that bad a price, but the problem is that price hasn't drop that much.
It does take some more work to make a LCD screen take VGA or RCA inputs, so there is the cost the LCD is brought at (a lot more than the laptop manufacturers buy them at), and then the intergration of circuits to accept VGA or RCA input.
I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.
They actually have a valid point, *gasp*, I mean when I can get a laptop with an LCD near/cheaper than a LCD on its own, something is wrong. There is a demand for these displays, so manufacturers can't claim that that's the reason prices are high, so maybe price fixing could be in place.
I thought the same thing for quite a while, but then I stumbled on this at my local Walmart. For $400, I got an 18-inch LCD.
It has an analog VGA connector (a good thing for me; most of my PCs lack digital output), a 160-degree viewing angle (I didn't think that was even possible -- 180 would be viewing completely from the side), 1280x1024 native resolution, and does a great job resampling other resolutions. I can't prove it yet, but I am pretty sure it uses subpixel rendering when resizing lower resolutions.
So all the things I didn't like about LCDs a couple years ago -- limited viewing angle, bad resampling, digital-only connector, small size, and of course price -- are solved with this Walmart cheapo.
I'm sure it won't last all that long, but for the price, it's really nice, easy on the eyes, and much sharper than my last monitor (an aging Trinitron).
So, at one month old, mine has convinced me to never go back to a CRT.
Oh, and in games or full-screen video it rocks. You still only get 60 actual refreshes a second, but that's more than enough (and unlike a CRT the light is constant anyway). Fast motion can be a tiny bit blurry, but nothing like my crappy Compaq laptop... and in games, the blur actually looks better in my opinion -- more realistic (or I'm just goofy)...
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I took an international business class at RIT and I distinctly remember my professor say that there is a tarrif on lcd screens for the US market. Apparantly US lcd manufactures were loosing sales to Japanese and other foreign markets because they could produce them much cheaper. Has anyone else heard of such a thing?
I've been wondering about this for over a year, ever since I got a ThinkPad A22p, which has a GORGEOUS 15" LCD that runs native at 1600x1200.
I have a 19" CRT at home and a 21" at work, and this LCD beats both of them for quality, so i looked around to try and buy one. It literally did not exist -- you can but 19" LCDs with 1280x1024 (I suppose some people enjoy large pixels) but trying to buy one of these beautiful small LCDs was impossible. IBM doesn't sell them, nobody sells them.
I'm totally baffled by this. We would love to buy these LCDs for our desktops if we could get them for $1,000+ but as it is we keep these huge 21" 75 pound monitors on peoples desks, and most of those are run at 1280x1024 to stay readable.
I'm actually thinking about buying a cheap IBM and ripping it apart if I can get the screen cabling to go to the digital out on a GeForce card.
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There are a few things that you're not considering. They are the key differences between a laptop LCD screen and a desktop LCD.
Desktop LCDs are made to have a very high brightness and high contrast ratio. Laptop LCDs are made for low power consumption, and thus don't need as powerful lighting units.
Desktop LCDs are built to have a very wide viewing angle. This uses some fancy technology and manufacturing processes that are pretty expensive to accomplish this task. Laptop LCDs are made on purpose to have a narrow viewing angle so the guy next to you on the airplan can't see your screen. A narrow viewing angle makes the LCD's requirements much cheaper to achieve.
Not price fixing. How could that be? If it was possible to sell 19" LCDs for $250 and still turn a profit, some one would be doing so. I think we need to look at a deeper reason. The same companies making LCDs are the same companies that have large stocks of CRT TVs and monitors. If they sell an LCD for $100 what are they going to do with that 17" CRT that they have time and money invested in?
I don't know if that is indeed the reason or not.. but it's something to think about.
In capitalism any one can cut prices and drive down the cost of a product. 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. I suspect the same is the case with LCDs.
All I can see is that LCD producers are afraid of the price war that we have seen sometime ago among the SDRAM producers. I remember to read about the fear of some producers get out of buissines due to the small profit ranges.
What could be better? A price war? Or avoiding producers going out of bussiness?
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I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
.....when you buy an LCD monitor, the price is artificially low. When you by products that aren't in that league, you come closer to the actual costs involved.
We all know that an automobile, in parts, is worth more than what you pay for a complete car off the lot. Try pricing the entire car, part by part, over the part's dept. counter, and then go to 3rd party suppliers, and watch how prices fluctuate. It is easy to imagine fixing if you don't understand how the market works.
Nothing's fixed, beyond the normal markets forces (supply/demand) causing prices to level for certain products, etc.
I believe the interface is almost always an LVDS thing, very similar to that used in one of the greatest desktop LCDs of all time, the SGI 1600W. The problem is that each different panel has a different set of parameters that you need to set/use with an LVDS controller and
1) the parameteres ain't easy to find publically documented
2) LVDS controllers for regular PCs (like an Nvidia card with an LVDS interface) are few, far between and not very cheap
I would desperately like to be proven wrong on this - I'd especially like to find a dvi2lvds box for a reasonable price that I could use with any of the thousand or so bare laptop LCD screens that are offered on ebay every day...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Every instance of a good being sold above its cost (or, more precisely, its marginal cost) is *not* an example of price fixing. In general, such mark-ups occur when supply is inadequate to cover existing demand. In the textbook models, it is always assumed that there are competitors with no real capacity constraints who are willing to undercut the imcumbent firms when prices are higher than cost.
... this is not price-fixing; it's just the firms earning a short-run rent until more capacity is added.
But in real life, especially in electronics markets, firms can face binding capacity constraints. A mark-up in the LCD market is an example of price-fixing only if the existing firms are creating an artificial shortage: i.e. they are explicitly or tacitly colluding to keep supply artificially low. The classic example of such efforts is OPEC and oil. However, if all firms are providing their capacity *and* the price at which quantity demanded equals quantity supplied is greater than cost