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LCD Monitors with Dead Pixels/Columns for Sale?
The Other White Meat asks: "I want to put a computer in my kitchen. For space reasons, I want to make it an LCD; a 15" screen would be perfect. This monitor is going to be exposed to harsh conditions (flying food, jumping cats, general mishandling). I don't want to spend so much money on it that if I came home and found it broken that I would be upset by it. I figured there must be plenty of places that will sell LCDs with dead pixels or columns, where I might be able to pick one up in the $50-100 range, but so far I have found nothing. Surely there must be a market for 'Grade B' LCD monitors, for precisely this sort of low life expectancy sort of usage? So fellow readers, can you succeed where Google® has failed, and lead me to the cheapo LCDs?"
.. as long as they know you need it.
Seriously tho, I'm not sure you'll find it. Problems like that show up early on. If somebody buys an LCD and it's got dead pixels, it gets returned. It'll show up again re-conditioned.
Perhaps you'd be better of spending a little more, then getting a laptop that can be closed?
"Derp de derp."
I'll sell ya my IPAQ IA-1 running linux for $150 plus shipping.
This is what I'm using in my kitchen. Not just the LCD, but an entire computer. Me, I took off their pipe stand, made a simple bracket, and bolted it right to the wall (after giving up on a hinging bracket that folds underneath a cabinet... Home Depot doesn't carry any suitable hinges, and I don't have a machine shop.)
badflash.com has them for sale for like $50, and I think this includes hard drive.
The circuitry and casing of a monitor is cheap. It's the glass that's expensive. If your theory was right, a 23" LCD wouldn't cost three grand (even though the high-end model is always disproportionately marked-up, if Apple, Sony and SGI can charge $3k, then Acer would gladly come in at $2k if it could be made that cheaply, then generic company B would come in at $1.8k, and so on).
If a 15" LCD sells for around $300, then a manufacturer getting $100 for an LCD with, say, 20 bad pixels would find that preferable to getting $0 for an LCD with 20 bad pixels (which is what they get for them now).
As for how they came up with the number, I can guarantee you it wasn't because they wanted a 95% success rate. They want a 100% success rate. They will only throw out LCD's when the cost of selling them is greater than the cost of throwing them away. It's supply and demand, not "95% success ain't bad."
Until recently, LCD's cost so much that people wouldn't put up with many defects, though the reality has been that there were always a few. Now that prices have dropped and quality has increased (which are related in this case as yields have improved greatly in the last few years), a market is opening for lower-quality, lower-priced LCD's. I bet this guy would be happy to pay $50 for a passive matrix, faulty-pixeled LCD.
Personally, I've been thinking it would be great to buy a small black-and-white or greyscale LCD to use on a headless server for those times I need a screen on it. It'd be a lot more convenient than lugging a huge (or even small) CRT around.
I tried this route actually, calling Dell's refurb outlet, as well as their tech support line. They couldn't seem to grasp the idea that I actually wanted one of those dead pixel/ dead column LCDs, and I wouldn't be returning it as defective.
Of course, when I explained that in return for buying one of their returned monitors, I wanted it cheap ( as in under $100 ), that's when they got hopelessly confused and the conversation went nowhere...
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