SPCR

Hey guys , just to pass time , don't you think that LCD screen are wayyy to expensive ? i am personnaly not an LCD owner , but i have considered it but have been discouraged by seeing the prices , so all you LCD-owners come and tell us if you got a freacking good deal on your LCD screen or did you just pasy the 600 $ for a decent one ?

IMHO they are somewhat overpriced, but they seem to be getting a bit cheaper.

My major gripe is that LCDs are the one of a few items that defects are almost expected. Just about all online stores have a minimum dead pixel policy. To me one dead pixel means a defect product, not six or eight.

BTW, I do own a LCD. I bought locally so I could check to make sure It had no dead pixels.

How much did you pay for ? and even if they lower the price , i don't think there gunna make a 200 $ jump , it will lower penny per penny and will take a long time to reach CRT lvls ( look at stores that sell CRTs 15" at 15 $ ... you won't even see any Used LCDs at 150 $ )

I paid $400 for the Samsung 710N, worth every penny.

The 2001FP and the 2005FPW are sub $600. Pretty good price for 16ms 20'' LCD's.

Of course, if you go buy an Apple Cinema Display, you're going to paying a lot.

600 $ is already alot when you can get the equivalent but in a bigger volume for like 6 times less.

The thing about LCD panel defects is, they're already throwing out a fair number of them at the factory because they exceed the maximum number of defects. If they tossed every panel with any defect at all, prices would go way up. That said, there are online shops with zero-defect guarantees: they won't bother checking the panel themselves, but if you find a defect that bothers you, just ship the monitor back and they'll send you a new one. It's still a hassle, but it means picky people can get a perfect panel (say that 10 times fast!), while the store doesn't have to raise prices much because imperfect panels still get sold.

Right now I'm using a 19" Dell panel, which set me back $500. It came in the mail with two sub-pixel defects (one blue stuck-on, one green stuck-off). I've only noticed them once, and that was when I was doing dead pixel display tests. I can't even find them right now--it's as if they've disappeared. After fretting about ordering a panel without first testing it, it turns out that a couple dead pixels can be a complete non-issue.

NigthStalker wrote:600 $ is already alot when you can get the equivalent but in a bigger volume for like 6 times less.

That's quite an exaggeration. A good 19" CRT would cost half as much as my current monitor, but 21" CRT's can cost ~$450, plus CRT's always lose an inch around the edges. I guess the equivalent to my LCD would be a 20" CRT costing about $350. The price difference isn't that bad. Sure, you could probably go pick up a $100 19" bargain-basement CRT, but it wouldn't be very pleasant to work with, so I don't consider that a fair comparison.

My 19" Pro monitor and my 18" LCD "business" monitor cost about the same - just two years difference between the purchases.

Do you have any idea how ancient the CRT technology is? At the same age, I expect LCDs to be dirt cheap too.

Hello:

One of the reasons that CRT's are so inexpensive is that LCD's are better monitors for most uses. Twelve years ago (or so) a 20"-21" CRT would set you back almost $2,000. A very high quality Eizo (or as it was called then, Nanao) 17" CRT would cost $1,400. Ten years ago a "bargain" 17" vertically flat CRT was $850. (Remember too, that these CRT sizes are the *tube* but NOT the visible image size.)

Today you can buy good quality 19" LCD (equivalent image size to those 20"-21" CRT's) for $450-$500. And what do today's 21" CRT's cost? A decent one is $400-450! So there is a $50-$100 premium for LCD?

My major gripe with flat panels is their limited maximum resolution; there is no way I can afford to have 1920x1440 twice like I have on my two Eizo 21" CRT's. But from a power consumption POV alone I'd like to go the LCD way though... let alone the fact that I had to add a support to my desk to be able to carry 2x 40kg.

17" TFTs have come down in price so much that I am now considering getting one just for LAN parties though

I would say they are somewhat expensive at the moment, but the quality goes up and the price down with every new released series. Im on my second LCD, first was a acer al1714, it had terrible performance on dark colors. Dark games were unplayable.. it cost me 420€, now it costs 290€. I got the Samsung 710T for 430€ and could not be happier with it Still, i expect this one to cost 290€ in 8months or so and a much better panel available for 430€ In five years or so, i expect CRT will be gone in home-use both in TV and computer use. There will still of course be CRTs used, but not many new ones sold and manufacturers eventually lose interest in developing them.

It's getting a lot better.
You can get a decent 17" panel with analog and digital inputs for £250 ($470) these days. When you consider to get a 17" viewable image on a CRT you need a 19" tube, which can cost up to £220ish for a decent one, the price difference is not that bad. Yes the 19" CRT will give you more like 17.5"/18.0" viewable, but the LCD won't break your desk or your back - especially if like me you use two monitors and carry them up and down stairs a lot when moving between university and home.

Anyone know why Plasma screens are so expensive?

Riiight... My VP171b (high-end Viewsonic display) cost me about $550 this summer. Now it's down to about $375. 'nuff said.

Trip wrote:Anyone know why Plasma screens are so expensive?

Because it's a much more complex technology than LCD, from a chemistry and electronics point of view. However, it scales better than LCD, which is why your 32" widescreen TV's are Plasma screens.
The complexity is the reason for your 32" widescreen TV costing £1500.

Like all technologies, it will be refined and the prices will fall, or it will be replaced with an alternative that's cheaper. It's just a matter of time.

maybe they aren't really expensive for you guys , but an average Joe won't go paying 400 $ for an 17" screen , he'll prefer keep his money and wait till the prices go down.
And I prefer the sacrifice of valuble desk area for the CRTs and have some money left to buy other more important stuff like CPU ram video ; i got my CTR ( AOC Spectrum 7Vlr 16" viewable ( out of 21" ); max display : 1280x1024 ) used and im happy whit it , not that i have never considered LCD , but there expensive , over my budget.

So if anyone of you guys wanna prove that LCD screens are expensive , send 100 $ each at 737 Emailme , Ifyoureallywannasend 0K? :P0

Wait a few months and you'll see that the LCD prices are dropping fast... Sony stopped producing CRTs last year and the only one they sells online is the GDM-C520K 21" CRT for 1799$. NEC/Mitsubishi did the same thing with their aperture grille CRTs. With Sony and NEC aiming for the LCD market, I'm sure the others will follow. If CRTs are cheap now, that's because the manufacturers are selling all the remaining units. I'm sure it will be difficult to buy a brand new CRT in 2006...

From Desktop Engineering:

November, 2004

(...) Engineers looking for 19-inch and larger displays may not have a choice but to consider LCDs. When Sony stopped manufacturing tube-based monitors last year, it left one supplier of aperture-grill CRTs in the market. The sole survivor, Mitsubishi, announced earlier this year that it plans to cease aperture-grill CRT production by the middle of 2005. In response, a number of monitor makers are turning their full attention to LCDs. Sony and Eizo Nanao Technologies are no longer actively selling CRTs aimed at engineering applications. Others, including Hewlett-Packard, will sell off existing CRTs, and hint that they won’t introduce any new tube models in the years ahead.

From BeHardware:

The end of the Diamondtron
Posted on 20/10/2004 at 10:01 by Vincent


Sony was the last but one Aperture Grille cathode ray tube manufacturer (“Tron” grille technology). The last one was Nec-Mitsubishi. But it is over now, the Diamondtron production will stop this week. Mitsubishi already stopped the 17” production last year, but now it is the 19 and 22” turn.
CRT screen fans will now have to fall back on LG’s Shadow Mask or Samsung’s Dot Mask, amongst others.

Our condolences to gamers and graphic designers.

On Newegg, a decent 15" LCD is about $200. A decent 17" CRT display is about $110. I don't consider that to be a huge price difference.

i don't know about Newegg , but around here , it's not those prices

around here, I can get a decent 19" monitor for $250 (Samsung 955DF)
A nice 17" LCD goes around $350 (NEC 1735NXM, Samsung 710N, 16ms and 12ms respectively)

LCDs aren't that expensive considering the viewable size is a lot bigger than the same size CRTs.

Like all technologies, it will be refined and the prices will fall, or it will be replaced with an alternative that's cheaper. It's just a matter of time.

Unless we've finally hit that wall (and this is as good as it gets).

Dear lord, I hope not!


Actually, I forgot to mention earlier that there is already an alternative in development: OLED, or Organic LED.
I'm not overly sure on the specifics, but as far as I can remember it uses some sort of polymer as the active cell rather than the crystaline peizzo-electronic substance found in current generation panels.
The advantages are supposed to include much faster response times and color reproduction on the level of a CRT. Power consumption is also supposed to be lower.
The current issues are poor yeild and difficulty scaling to monitor sizes, much like early LCD panels.

[edit]
Breif overview here. Although it's far from comprehensive, it's a good start. Google has plenty of other info.

I'm more interested in SED than OLED or plasma; unfortunately, I didn't see a single SED-based display at CES.

-Ed

Can't say I've heard of that one...
The info I found on google looks interesting though.

Yep there are many alternatives to LCD being researched, wich is a very good thing Here, you can get an "el-cheapo" 42" plasma tv for 1800€. Shure its crap, and not worth buying, seriously, but in a year you can get a quality unit for that price and the "el-cheapo" will be 1200€ or so, plus the cheap one will be as good as a fairly good quality panel was the year before. This is a good thing

Well there are also issues such as longevity or useable lifetime; personally, looking at the technologies that are already available, my preference lies in DLP rear projection; while plasma has the best blackpoints as compared to LCD or DLP, both, plasma and LCD dim over time (but plasma is worse), and the only thing that can be done it basically to replace with a new unit. With a DLP rear projection unit, the lamp can be replaced, and that's much cheaper than buying a whole new TV. None of this even factors in initial cost; plasmas are ludicrously expensive compared to LCD or rear projection. The best part of DLP over standard projection is that it completely avoids calibration issues; we can never seem to get perfect calibration on our 2-year-old Toshiba.

If SED works like they say, then it should have an equally long useable life as conventional CRTs. I wonder if SEDs would be as buzzy as CRTs, though...

-Ed

Hello:

SED, huh? I'd seen this a while back, but didn't know what they called it now. The limitation may be the strength of the glass on the face and back -- because there has to be a vacuum in there....

The 21" OLED that Samsung showed, sounds to be pretty sweet: 5000:1 contrast ratio, 400nits of brightness -- that is generated by the pixels themselves!! There is no backlight...and they are fast, have very wide viewing angles -- but so far, they "wear out" faster than plasma or LED:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050105-4500.html
http://samsung.com/PressCenter/PressRel ... 000089670#
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1132782,00.asp

All we want is a perfect display -- for free!! C'mon!!

DLP seems to have got much, much better during recent years too.. Now the best ones are as thin as a plasma panel Few weeks ago i looked at tvs, just for fun, and the DLPs were as thick as CRTs.. The image also became unseeable if you went nearer than 1 meter of the screen and from further away they were still porr quality. I guess those were just crap models of DLP though The best current p+lasmas claim to have a expected lifetime of over 60.000h, and not to forget CRT also degrades over time. And seriously, who uses a tv for 60k hours? thats about 6y6m of 24/7 running. I suppose they end up like the ones on 24/7 at a shopping centre near us, the panels look like they have "bleeded" inside..

I was under the impression that LCD is more expensive than Plasma? Or is it just that LCDs are up to, what, 40"? biggest plasmas are 70" or 80" i think..? Its pretty much the same technology after all, the major difference being that plasmas are self lighting and LCDs need back-light. Technically, they are both liquid crystal displays right.. Im not claiming to be an expert, correct me if im wrong, cause i hate being wrong

DLPs still have an issue with the fact that you're essentially using a really high powered light bulb to project an image, IIRC. And the best DLPs that I've seen (though I wasn't at CES) are about 7" thick. Plasmas and LCDs are on the order of about 3" thick, if even that. The key difference is wall mount capabilities.

Yes, LCD IS more expensive than plasma, but LCD has a much higher resolution for its size. The LCD TV that I have my eye on has an MSRP of about $8k (though I can get it for $6k if I actually had the money. I've been teetering on getting one through Onecall where they have a no payments no interest plan until 06/2006). That particular LCD has a native resolution of 1920x1080. Plasmas that can produce that resolution are even more expensive than that. When you get down to slightly saner resolutions like 1280x720 or 1366x768, plasmas are about the same, but they're also a good 7" bigger (next largest LCD is 37"). The flip side is that it's nearly impossible to find a plasma smaller than 42", so if you need a slightly smaller screen than that, you need to go with LCD.

Nici, Plasma technology and LCD technology are vastly different. Plasma screens use small capsules of charged gases (plasma) to produce their image, while LCDs use liquid crystal that filter out polarized light. If you want to see something interesting and happen to be near a 3d movie, take the 3d glasses and look at anything LCD through the lens (a digital watch, a cellphone or a PDA will work). If you rotate the lens, you'll find an angle where you can't see anything at all. Another critical difference between Plasmas and LCDs is power. LCDs consume 1/2-2/3 the power of a CRT. Plasmas consume much more. We SPCRers can appreciate the need to evacuate heat from enclosed spaces, and LCDs can do that much more easily since they produce less of it.

Now whether LCD monitors are overpriced or not, that's tough to say. For dirt cheap "display a picture," yes, they're overpriced. But when you start looking at CRTs that are flat, then the price differences start getting a lot closer. If you look at pure power consumption, there's no contest. My 20" LCD supposedly draws 90W (I've never measured it). You can't find a 19" or 21" monitor that draws that little power. And 90W is a LOT for an LCD.

If you move a lot (like a college student), then you'll find that effort in moving an LCD alone can be worth the difference in price. Just putting my 21" CRT into my car was an effort and a half, and I was damn lucky my doors could open as wide as it did. And I remember seeing my desk bend when I put said CRT on top of it. I quickly got a new desk after that. Heck, even just the desk SPACE is worth it for some people. I can actually use my desk to write in a notebook if I wanted, something I couldn't do before.

So as you can see there are a number of advantages to an LCD screens. And the fact is, people are willing to pay a little more for those advantages.

Steve's right about the price-per-inch; personally I'm seeking out the cheapest 720p display I can possibly find with good image quality, so long as they are at least 20", and the only affordable ones are LCD and CRT; plasma's way out of my own budget range, because they simply aren't made to small sizes (unfortunately, so are DLPs, but my dad's the one interested in DLPs); this is why I quoted LCD as being cheaper--the entry level HD-ready LCDs are several orders of magnifude cheaper than entry level HD-ready plasmas or DLPs.

-Ed