Flipping through buy.com, I notice that the cheapest 15" LCD TV costs $650, while an average 15" LCD monitor costs about half that. They both use the same technology, so why is one so much more expensive? Is this strictly a matter of market forces or is there something subtler going on here?
For one thing the price of things is set by supply and demand and not by the cost to produce them. For another, a TV receiver has more electronics than a monitor and is therefore more expensive to produce.
A television includes tuning circuitry and special features like PiP (requiring a 2nd tuner), V-chip, CATV rediness, audio processing & amplification, etc. With a few exceptions, monitors are only monitors.
Is it possible that a 15" TV is larger than a 15" monitor? There are different rules regarding product labeling. Perhaps 15" TVs have full 15 inches of viewable area, while the monitor’s 15" is the size of the entire LCD panel including the borders.
Also, LCD panels designed for computer use tend to be slow and show considerable blur when used for video. Some LCD TV manufacturers advertise how they use super-fast LCD panels and eliminate blur. However I don’t know if all TVs use fast LCDs.
Sure, but a 15" tube TV contains all of those components, and can be had for around $200, so they can’t account for all of the price difference.
By that logic, 15" tube TVs should cost nearly the same as 15" LCD TVs. But this is not the case simply because 15" TVs are not in great demand. Lots of variables go into the final cost of a product. It’s not just a matter of distilling a product down into the cost of its component parts.
As already mentioned, this TV has all the features of a regular VGA computer screen, plus the TV stuff (Tuners, remote control and sensor, multiple input ports)
Another big ticket item in this TV is probably a line doubler or scaler. The reason is that a TV signal is interlaced (every other line drawn each time the screen is refreshed) whereas this screen is likely progressive scan ( every line drawn every time)
In order to get a TV picture to display properly, this TV must guess at what to draw for the blank lines in the TV signal.
I think what Emilio was saying was that even if the CRT tube basically cost nothing, the price difference between the TV LCD and the computer LCD is greater than the cost of the CRT TV and all its parts.
I doubt that demand for LCD TVs is significantly higher than CRTs at this point, and is lower if anything.
That’s at most a PCB board that can be directly copied from their CRT TV counterparts. Big whop.
Doesn’t an LCD television have a different type of refresh rate? The two may not be the same technology at all.
Yes sofa, that’s exactly what I was talking about in my post. NTSC TV is a 30fps interlaced, whereas VGA is 60fps progressive. You need relatively sophisticated hardware to be able to convert NTSC to VGA.
Ah, yes. I see it now, racekarl. Thanks for the explanation.
The LCD monitor already has some sophisticated hardware to convert from VGA to what the LCD panel actually wants. So the extra cost to move from NTSC to what the panel wants is another $0.50 in slightly larger die area for one of the ASICs in the LCD monitor.
Yes, but you still have to sink all the design and tooling costs for the new product, not to mention any marketing. It’s a new product, so you can probably expect more in terms of warrantee service and returns as well. It’s also sort of the case that CRT TVs are pretty much commodities with not much of a profit margin. LCD TVs, being new to the market, can still probably command a somewhat higher profit margin just because there’s less competition.
So: a. New products are expensive to produce, design, and market.
b. They charge more because they can.
It’s mainly about having really, really good refresh capabilities to avoid blurring. As scr4 pointed out. The extra electronics for tuner etc. are small potatoes. The 30fps/60fps has nothing to do with it. The original interlaced rate was set over 60 years ago limited by the electronics of the time. Needless to say, we’ve gotten substantially better electronics since then. Frame buffering and all that is cheap. (Good VCRs have had them for years.)
Economy of scale has some to do with it. But I think some people are missing an important point: Those $199 LCD monitors are crap. If you want a quality LCD monitor, expect to pay well over $500. So the OP is comparing apples and oranges. There is always a market in PC gear for people who sacrifice quality for price, even on the newest gear. But for TVs, new tech that’s also crappy doesn’t sell well.
Beyond the items already mentioned, based on my eyeballing them at the local Circuit City, I believe the LCD TV’s typically had a substantially wider viewing angle than the LCD PC monitors.
What the costs are of implementing this wide viewing angle are I do not know, but I don’t believe they are trivial at this stage in the technology.
Hmm, ftg, I don’t think thats it either.
Notice that he was NOT comparing the LCD TV to a $199 computer monitor, but rather to a $350 ViewSonic, which is most assuredly NOT crap.
In fact, a check of PCConnection shows * only one* 15" LCD computer monitor over $500 (an NEC) with Sony and Apple being the only other two in that price range.
Perhaps it DOES have something to do with the market for the two products. A 15" LCD TV is somewhat of a niche product. The vast majority of people who want a 15" TV have enough space for a $150 CRT. LCD versions are generally special purpose situations where the customer is willing to spend more for the convenience. Being in a niche market will lower production quantities, reduce competition and raise costs.
LCD monitors, on the other hand, are anything BUT niche. Space issues are much more important on a desk than in an entertainment center. Thus many more people are interesed in LCD monitors, which drives up production and competition, lowering costs and price. Not to mention all of the production and design work that has gone into laptops, which is directly applicable to LCD monitors.
Uh wouldnt it more have to do with whats inside an LCD tv? Think about it, you buy a 15" LCD monitor for 300 bucks and what does it do? nuthin. So you stick a computer with an audio card to the monitor and it gets something but what you wanted was to watch tv shows so you stick a tv tuner into the computer and you get your 15" LCD TV.
Now since you only watch tv you take out the computer programs, the peripherals, the extra doohickeys and whatnot and you end up with a processor, some BIOS, the graphics card with tuner, audio card, memory (no hard drive needed), speakers, buttons and a remote control capability and that all probably amounts to another 300 bucks.
TV LCD screen has a faster refresh rate for the pixels. I think it’s something like 20ms while an LCD monitor is at 40ms.
so the TV LCD doesn’t ghost as much as an LCD monitor.
But there are probably other factors that make LCD TV more expensive THAN LCD monitors.