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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?"
Seems like the obvious option...
Why not contact the manufacturers themselves, and asking for some of their 'grade-b' stuff? I'm sure they'll be happy to either tell you to buzz off, or send you oodles of broken monitors for little more than shipping.
You also might want to look for places that repair them, and other monitors of that nature. Computer shops, in other words.
Another place might be your local neighborhood TV repair shop. But this might be stretching it a bit, because I've found that most of the shops these days are filled with idiots that wouldn't know the right end of a monitor to look at, let alone fix the innards of it.
And if that all fails, then goto the junkyard and look in the newer SUV's and Van's for the LCD screens that come in some of them... and hope that the grizzled old guy behind the counter doesn't realize that is worth 500 bucks... And doesn't want you to pay with ass-dollars...
I suspect, but don't know, that it costs more to make an LCD, put it in a suitable enclosure with a controller card, box it and ship it than your $50 price mark, regardless of the number of bad pixels.
Since the LCD is the only bad part then it's cheaper to find that it doesn't meet specs right off the line before ever attaching any circuitry. The only thing lost at that point is the time to manufacture, and some small amount of materials.
Lastly, most of the big display manufacturers probably have the high-volume LCD lines to the point where units thrown away due to minor defect (but still usable, as in your need) are very low, much less than 10%, probably under 5% or even 1%.
The reason we have specs which include "no dead pixels inside center area, up to eight outside" are not because someone sat down and decided that was the case, or because it was determined that after 8 pixels around the border people started having siezures. It was most likely determined by a bean counter looking at the numbers, and determining that the 95% success rate would include screens which may have up to that many defects in those areas.
Now that they have a starting point, they've refined the process not to reduce dead pixels, but to reduce dead pixels that fall outside those requirements.
I imagine that you can special order LCDs from a major manufacturer in quantity and lower your cost by lowering the requirements, but I doubt it could be profitable for more than a year or two until LCDs finally cost around $100 for the 15" versions.
-Adam
Instead of buying a B-grade display and expecting it to break every few months, what about buying a standard cheap-ish 15-inch LCD and investing in a decent enclosure?
I'm sure you'll be able to buy the sort of monitor housings they use at museums and the like, with a thick layer of perspex or glass between the monitor and the outside world. That way, you'd get a decent display, and it would be less likely to break due to people spilling things on it, leaning on it, drawing on it, etc.
I wish I could point you in the direction of a useful site... anyone know of anywhere you can buy enclosures like this?
5. The fewer working pixels, the better www.aintitcoolnews.com looks!
4. With those allergies, you're going to sneeze all over the monitor and not see everything already.
3. With luck, the dropout area will be in the same place most banner ads are.
2. You have a nice colorful iMac: you don't care what the machine looks like when turned on, why not save a buck or two?
1. You want to simulate that wonderful snowy look of Viacom cable service.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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.
Kill the cats before you cook them - I suffered a few broken LCDs myself before I figured that one out.