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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.
Specifically for us geeks it means cheaper cellular phones and laptops due to an oversupply of LCD manufacturing.
I think LCDs are the kind of things that attract non-geeks too. I mean, we've been trying to use eye-candy to lure people into using linux for ages (and by ages I mean...a couple of years). So I think a lot of people are going to start buying LCDs if they become cheap. I mean, I know plenty of geeks who would love to have a 21" LCD too. Maybe I just hang around all geeks and so I have no true perception of what "normal" people are like. In any event it's good that the prices are being lowered.
I'm against picketing but I don't know how to show it.
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?
I purchased my first 15" LCD monitor over 2 years ago, and I'm still shocked how the prices have not changed all that much from then. Any price drop to get me a new 19" LCD is more than welcome with me.
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.
Hmmm, oversupply of lcd manuf due to lack of interest in lcd tv's? Sounds like it means that cell phones with 15" lcd's will be on the market soon. Now you can really see how crappy your cell phone camera is.
Dell 2001FP.
That is almost half of the price you said and a VERY awesome monitor. I work at a healthcare facility and several of our physicians have this monitor and it is awesome. Great response time as well. Very crisp.
Chris
At >$5,000 for a 40" LCD TV, exactly what market impact were they expecting? There are not too many folks out there with that kind of disposable income. I'd love to have a large, widescreen LCD TV, but I'm waiting for a good quality 42" model for $3,000. If another technology wins out because the LCD TVs can't find the right price/performance ratio, that's fine. It doesn't change the amount I have to spend on toys.
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
...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.
Wouldn't a phone with a 21" display be a bit cumbersome?
On the other hand...
"What's that in your pocket?"
"Twenty-one inches of pure happiness! Want to see it?"
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
The margins on the larger LCD TV's are HUGE.
A friend of mine works at Sears, doing commission sales on home entertainment products. He'll make $300+ on the sale of 1 big LCD TV
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!"
What the heck are they expecting when they sell LCD TV's for two to three times the cost of the SAME SIZE LCD monitor?
I can walk into Best Buy, buy a cheap 17" monitor for $250 - $300 after rebate, and put a TV tuner box from Viewsonic on it for $150, that's $400 for a 17" TV. If I walk over to the TV sections, the CHEAPEST 15" TV is almost $500. The 17" LCD TV's are between $650 - $900... one is priced over $1000. So what's the deal? Why the hell would I EVER buy an LCD TV? There's absolutely no reason to pay as much as they want for an LCD TV. They are overcharging something fierce, when LCD monitors are cheaper, it's obviously not the LCD that's costing more for the TV... it's just plain corporate greed.
So no... I sure as hell won't be buying an LCD TV anytime soon.
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.
While a 42-inch Sony Wega LCD TV retails for $10,000, a 42-inch plasma set can be had for about $4,500. LCD TVs accounted for a measly 3 percent of all sets sold in the United States in 2003.
I am a well-documented TV hater. One thing I could never understand were all the ads for TVs that cost $2k, $5k, and even $10k for the last couple of years. I thought that if they are advertising them people must be buying them. I'm interested to read that this isn't the case. But still, $4.5k for a TV? OMGWTFBBQ. Is Joey that much funnier on a $4.5k or even a $10k set?
No? Now I get the real joke.
Speak truth to power.
The problem is that there is a 200+ dollar price difference between an LCD computer monitor and an LCD TV at the same size. This is ridiculous since the only real difference may be the addition of cheap speakers and a TV tuner.
You can get a 14" LCD monitor for less than $300 but the TV version is over $500. It's just not worth it. And of course price increases geometrically with size.
Economy of scale has not worked its magic the way it has with tube TVs (tube TVs are dirt-cheap these days).
You have captured the essence of the problem.
Further, when you look closely at an LCD television, you notice that the image quality is no better than the image produced by a CRT television. So, why would anyone the premium price for the LCD television?
People do want the convenience of an LCD, which uses much less space than a CRT. Yet, they also want improved picture quality in order to justify the price.
The answer is just around the corner: optical interference displays (OIDs). They produce far sharper and brighter images than an LCD. The OID also consumes less power than an LCD.
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.
Negative points are:
There are other thin TV techologies coming along, though, which may be better for TVs than LCD (but perhaps a bit too heavy for a monitor, compared to how useful LCDs are for monitors).
Corps HATE losing money.
Right, because individuals just LOVE to lose it.
paintball
Ok, ehough speculation. The law is specific as to what contitutes a defective screen. The standard is ISO 13406-2. Toms hardware has a good review on the law. The link is:3 0319/ index.html
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/display/200
I suggest you go annd read it but if not...
In summary: There are 4 grades of LCD.....if they do not meet this standard then you have not bought an "official LCD display" and then it is defective , the official sales policy of the shop is not relevant. Just go and exchage. the rest is toms hardware quotes:
"Class 1, the highest, allows no defects at all. Class 4, the lowest, allows up to 262!"
If they do not specify, the monitor is Class 1 by default and you can have it changed at the smallest pixel defect.
The standard distinguishes four types of defective pixel.
* Type 1: number of always-lit pixels.
* Type 2: number of always-unlit pixels.
* Type 3: other defects, particularly on sub-pixels and the RGB cells making up pixels (lit or unlit). This means red, green and blue pixels lit the whole time. Experience shows that this is undoubtedly the most common defect.
For 15" LCD Panels
Native resolution is 1024 x 768 pixels, a total of 786,432 pixels.
Class 1 panels: this is the easiest - no pixel defects are allowed.
Class 2 panels are more complicated.
* Type 1: Lit pixels allowed = 2 x 786,432 / 1,000,000 = 1.57.
* Type 2: Unlit pixels allowed = 2 x 786,432 / 1,000,000 = 1.57.
* Type 3: Red, green or blue pixels allowed = 5 x 786,432 / 1,000,000 = 3.93.
If you refer to the standard, 2 always-lit pixels is >1.57. So this is over the top and the warranty comes into play. 15" ISO 13406-2-compliant panels may not allow more than: Type 1 + Type 2 + Type 3 = 5 defective pixels altogether, with a maximum of one lit, one unlit and three red, green or blue pixels.
17" Panels:
This is calculated the same way as for the 15".
Resolution = 1280 x 1024 = 1,310,720 pixels.
Class 1 panels: no pixel defects are allowed.
Class 2 panels:
* Type 1: Unlit pixels allowed = 2 x 1,310,720 / 1,000,000 = 2.62.
* Type 2: Lit pixels = 2 x 1,310,720 / 1,000,000 = 2.62.
* Type 3: Red, green or blue pixels allowed = 5 x 1,310,720 / 1,000,000 = 6.55.
If you refer to the standard, two always-lit pixels is 3>2.62. So, this is over the limit and the warranty comes into play.
17" ISO 13406-2-compliant panels may not allow more than: Type 1 + Type 2 + Type 3 = 10 defective pixels altogether, with a maximum of two lit, two unlit and six red, green or blue pixels.