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Slack LCD TV Market Means Cheaper Phones And Monitors
Shakrai writes "CNN and Business2 are running a story about the apparent failure of LCD TVs to make a major market impact and what it means for you. Specifically for us geeks it means cheaper cellular phones and laptops due to an oversupply of LCD manufacturing. Does this mean I can finally afford that 21" LCD monitor I've always wanted?"
$389 for a 15" LCD screen can hardly be justified when 19" CRT's are half that price. Glad to see this coming.
PDAs though must be another story.
Its really not suprising they haven't really taken off, who wants to pay $500 for a 15 inch LCD television/monitor when they can get a 40 inch widescreen flatscreen tube for the same price? To be honest I can't see much of a difference between Plasma, Projection and Tube televisions when I'm just watching regular broadcast cable anyway.
They were stupid if they thought they were going to make money on them. Have you seen an LCD TV? They are very very small and they are very expensive. I have seen them side by side with standard TV sets and the newer plasma and other expensive alternatives and they just don't look good.
I myself was suckered into buying a low-end 27" TV from Apex. It's only needed as a secondary TV but the price was right. Why should I spend $1000 on a 15" LCD when I can spend $200 on a 27" with DVD built in?
id assume their more likely to accept a loss, and lower prices to reduce how much they do lose...
When is this going to become a viable reality? I really hate knowing that I will have to replace my laptop (column of damaged pixels), because there is no justifiably-priced means to simply replace the screen.
Perhaps a market for aftermarket LCD screens could taqake advantage of the surplus.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I don't think corporations can do much about supply and demand...
they want more money per unit so they adjust the supply (dump a bunch of at a cheaper price).
then the supply is down and the demand is down and the price is higher
Get paid to code OSS
...from my 17 inch CRT to an LCD is when it offers a higher resolution, at a low price. Right now all the LCD monitors I see offer nothing in terms of "upgrades" to resolution, etc. I can't justify spending $300 to get some room behind my monitor that was otherwise not there and to have to downgrade resolutions. Its not like I'll find some use for new space behind a new LCD monitor, and my computer desk wouldn't work with said LCD on a wall.
What I've always been told about LCD tech (someone correct me if I am wrong) is that there is a reason why high-res LCD is so expensive: dead pixels. There are only so many that can be tolerated before the panel is useless, and they have to start over. The screens for phones are tiny, the chance of getting an unacceptable number of dead pixels (and increasing cost) is small.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
With the advent of new technologies like OLED screens, amongst other things, I'm surprised companies aren't eager to release them.
One reason I'd imagine there are so many LCD's overstocked is that LCD screens might have nice refresh rates, but the monitors which dont suffer excessive blurring which is bad for gamers, tend to be the ones which cost a few grand. And while LCD screens best benefit the development of large monitors, large LCD monitors cost so much barely anyone has one these days (I still know people using ancient 15" CRT monitors.. I'm one of them).
Maybe if they helped companies like Nvidia to work on algorithms which would help reduce the blurring effect by adjusting the brightness of a colour which only gets drawn for a milisecond to help reduce the blurring), or something better, it could give them a killer market.. Every gamer on the block would want one.
Personally, the dead pixel problems some of the Manufacturers have on their monitors is one thing that makes me highly cautious about the cheap LCD screens
This is _normal_. New technology is always relatively expensive and many manufacturers try to get in on the ground floor to capture market-share and enjoy the relatively large per unit gross profit. Then, whoops, we've made too many, there's a market glut, inventories are growing, gotta mov'em out so drop the price and oh, there _are_ a lot of consumers out there who'll buy them at the new improved price, so more get manufactured, economies of scale take the price even lower, and the cycle continues.
Happens every time....
I'm a bit of a videophile (audiophile too but lets not get into that).
Currently, the best available picture quality for direct view is still the venerable CRT. LCD and Plasma screens need video scalers to map the input signal to the display and these are rarely any good, certainly not in the consumer level equipment. Also, LCDs have very poor black level so the picture often looks rather grey. Plasma screens often have poor colour characteristics and also suffer from short lifespans. If you are considering one though, make sure you buy the Video Essentials DVD and learn how to use it so you can test any prospective purchase.
For projection systems the situation is somewhat different, a CRT projector while often capable of staggering picture quality is much harder to set up than an LCD or DLP projector and vastly more expensive. LCDs are generally less good than a DLP projector. DLP has better contrast ratio but may suffer from rainbow fringing if you get a single chip example. Correct calibration will fix this. LCDs have been much harder to calibrate well compared with a DLP in my experience and often suffer from uneven colour: several examples I tested looked slightly green on one side of the screen and blue on the other. Yuck.
There are other technologies coming along (OLED for instance) that look likely to change the landscape dramatically. I certainly wouldn't plunk down any money on an LCD TV. A plasma screen would also not be on my list as the picture just isn't big enough for movies IMHO. A good DLP based front projector supplemented by a standard CRT for normal TV will be far cheaper, and likely better quality than a plasma screen of half the size. The video scaler (Faroudja DDI) in my little DLP projector is much better quality than any of those I have seen in LCD or plasma screens and the projector cost a fraction of the price of the 40" examples.
I would certainly recommend buying a 16:9 set though (I got my first one back in '92 and people thought I was mad) but look at direct view CRT or rear/front projection DLP for the best bang for the buck I think.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
The problem is that I need the real estate provided by a 19in CRT running at 1600x1200. A 17in LCD at 1280x1024 just doesn't cut it.
A decent 20in LCD that gives you 1600x1200 is, what, $700-$800 at least.
So, a good/very good 19in CRT for $250-$300 or a decent 20in LCD for $700-$800 (yes, I understand the screen will actually be bigger, but they are both running at the same resolution and that's what really matters).
Until the prices come down, I won't be making the switch.
I've just signed legislation that'll outlaw Russia forever. We'll begin bombing in five minutes.
Cheaper does not neccesarily mean affordable.For eg. If it falls from $500 to 400-450 , I still cannot afford it. :-P
Don't we all want lovely 21" LCD's to watch our collection of DivX movies?? or play doom3.
Lord of the Binges.
Are these the same people who told us in the 80s that CD prices would come down as production ramped up?
-Rich
What you have is excess capacity of the creation of LCDs, and so the LCDs created will simply be ones for a different purpose. The production of LCD TVs will simply be lowered to match the demand such that price levels are approximately maintained. On the other hand production of LCDs for other gadgets for which the demand outstrips supply will be increased. This may lead to these items becoming slightly cheaper but there are many other factors involved in the pricing of a PDA or a phone (especially the latter given deep discounting already) that the price of these may not be greatly affected by a reduced screen cost.
It is worth remembering that very few manufacturers make LCDs for computer monitors, even though there are very many brands. In terms of the retailers they will only wish to drop prices if it leads to such additional sales that it increases their profit. However they would rather sell more items at their current profit level. Market saturation and distinguishing your product on the basis of cost from a competitors comes into play here. Sometimes cutting the price of your monitor may not only reduce the profit margin but harm sales if your brand is considered to be a premium one. There are a lot of complex factors at play here.
Lets see
19" LCD monitor $1000
20" LCD TV $1600
The look of the faces of the tards that don't know there is NO difference...PRICELESS!
Hey, maybe we need a colour coded scale which consumers can use as a quick reference guide to commercial terrorism.... ah forget it just invade!
It's just not worth spending the extra money on a 15" LCD television. Consider the market - most small televisions are put in the kitchen, a bedroom, or a utility/exercise type room. People don't really want to spend much money on such televisions. Furthermore, the space savings of a 15" LCD over a 15" CRT television isn't that huge. A 15" CRT will happily sit on a dresser or a shelf.
The real market for LCD televisions is for the large televisions. The difference in physical volume between a 34+" LCD and a 34+" CRT television is significant. And you can wall mount an LCD - the CRT will need some form of stand.
I suspect that these lack-lustre sales are made worse by recent laptop trends. I've an 18 month old laptop I intended to replace after 2 years. The old laptop has a great 1600x1200 UXGA LCD screen. While I could make use of the higher performance processors found in more recent notebooks and would welcome a DVD writer and larger hard disk - these concerns are secondary to my ability to display my work on-screen. Almost every high spec laptop today comes with a "Wide" screen - WUXGA or similar - these wide-formats just don't suit my needs. I use small fonts which become unreadable on WUXGA as the aspect ratio changes sufficiently to cause eyestrain - when I increase my font size sufficiently to read my data on WUXGA I've lost any horizontal resolution advantage I may have gained.
The reason for this move to wide format screens is (sadly) obvious (once you break out a calculator). Screens are marketed upon diagonal size - but manufacturing cost is more closely related to screen area. It is interesting to note that 15.4" wide LCD has almost exactly the same screen area as a 15" LCD of traditional ratios - yet even apparently savvy buyers are mislead to believe they are getting a larger screen.
Supply and demand say that the price will go down.
The free market works great if
There are various examples where those conditions are not met.
There are also a few other singular cases where the elasticity in the market can become strained, such as healthcare provision. If you're hurtin', you might be willing to pay a lot to feel better, not die, etc.
On the LCD issue, I'm looking at big LCD TVs, like the Sharp Aquos 45". I like the native hi-res and the tolerably good pixel response time, but they're only just beginning to come onto the market and I'm not sure how expensive they are - the mentioned projected intial retail prices around US$10K are too steep for me, but if the price goes down 30% I'd probably get one. Samsung also has a big LCD in this size range.
Anyone out there with either of those?
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We're talking about a commodity item that is intended for every household in the US. Not a server that's intended for a niche market.
I don't consider plugging 1 extra wire into an LCD monitor a "Do-it-yourself" project. Regardless, ALL of the parts in an LCD TV are in the monitor + viewsonic box combo... and it's almost HALF as cheap as an equivilent TV. Not $100 cheaper, not even $200 cheaper, but $450 cheaper.
THAT is corporate greed, my friend. They are marking up the TV by ridiculous numbers, and then wondering why no one is buying them. It's kind of like "Duh." You're selling a product for 2x what it's worth and you wonder why no one buys it?