3 Firms Confess To Fixing LCD Prices, Agree To Pay $585M Fine 417
Oldyeller89 writes "LG, Sharp, and Chunghwa Picture Tubes pleaded guilty to charges of price fixing in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. They fixed the prices on LCD screens used not only in their products but also in other products such as Apple's iPods. The three companies agreed to pay $585 million in fines. Perhaps this will cause the price of our TVs to drop?" The New York Times also has a story on the outcome of this case.
Prices won't drop; profit margins may rise slightl (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ya Know... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So how much did they make? (Score:4, Informative)
actually their customers are Apple, and other product makers that paid a few bucks too much per panel and missed sales, not "consumers". So the public really doesn't see any of it as they paid the manufacturer and retailer of the product they bought a market price for the device.
Re:Is this related? (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe there is a limit on the clock speed? 1920 x 1080 x 50/60 Hz would give a clock speed in the range 103 MHz to 124.4 MHz, and a double-buffered 32-bit framebuffer of 16 MBytes.
Re:Plasma? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So how much did they make? (Score:5, Informative)
Imbalance of information is only one of the three major failure modes of the free market. Externalities both positive and negative, and natural monopolies are the other two.
Re:Plasma? (Score:3, Informative)
We have some LCDs in our test cells with burn in. LCDs aren't immune either. And these aren't some no name brands, these are Dell, relatively new LCDs. Now sometimes the data on the screen doesn't change for a few days, but that's no excuse for burn in.
Re:Plasma? (Score:4, Informative)
Almost all 17" LCDs are 1280x1024 which is 5:4. Anyone know why they use this and not 1280x960 (4:3)?
Re:Price drop (Score:3, Informative)
Artificially high == "colluding on prices to avoid market forces due to competition."
Re:Plasma? (Score:2, Informative)
The new-style iMacs in one lab I worked in had burn-in from the login prompt, since apparently a bug in the lab's systemwide configuration prevented the displays from sleeping. LCDs aren't immune to this, but a little bit of proper care can prevent this in the first place.
Also, oddly enough, after the configuration was repaired, the burn-in slowly faded, so I suppose it wasn't permanent.
Re:Plasma? (Score:3, Informative)
Gamut.
Re:Plasma? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not burn-in; it is image persistance and the display is not permanently damaged. How to fix it? Play a high-contrast full motion video for a few hours, or better yet, an animated image which turns all red pixels on then off (red then black), blue on then off (blue then black), then white (all pixels on) then black (all pixels off). Let each image display for at least a few seconds per.
My first iPAQ (a Pocket PC) exhibited this from the start menu, and running a slide show resolved the issue.
It's not burn-in. Burn-in is an actual evaporation (well, sublimation really) and/or burning of phosphors and cannot be corrected. Burn in "correction" on a plasma screen actually wears out the screen because those utilities are designed to burn in the rest of the screen to make the whole display more consistent.
Re:Plasma? (Score:4, Informative)
agreed.
you get much better colour and contrast on a CRT.
But, most people don't do graphics work for a living, and they won't care about getting accurate colours, they just care that they look good enough. LCD's use less power, look nice, and save desk space, these are things most people care about.
Also, LCD's don't flicker, and are much better for long jobs, as they cause less eye strain. I get headaches if i spend more than 4 hours in front of a CRT.
personally, I've been using both kinds of monitors, so i can get the best of both worlds. 90% of my work is done on a cheap LDC screen, then for the final 'touching up', before i send something off to be printed, i switch to a CRT to tweak the image.
Re:Plasma? (Score:2, Informative)
Color Invariance of CRT's (Score:4, Informative)
An LCD screen shows different colors depending upon your view angle. This is not good for graphics professionals.
Re:Plasma? (Score:1, Informative)
I have a couple of higher quality samsung LCD's (monitor and TV) purchased in the last 12 months. They're both much sharper than my 19" Viewsonic CRT in their native resolution but the black levels, response time, and contrast on both of them is awful compared to my CRT. For games (particularly games with a lot of dark lighting such as Thief series or Bioshock), I greatly prefer the old CRT.
As an added bonus, it can run at more than one resolution without becoming extremely blurry, and my old 7800GS can't handle 1680x1050 high detail in newer games (1280x960 high works pretty well though).
Re:Plasma? (Score:3, Informative)
LCDs have a few big downsides over CRTS as far as i'm concerned.
Firstly most 19 inch squarish (4:3 or 5:4) LCDs seem to top out at 1280x1024. That is just crap, I could get that on a 15 inch CRT. If I want to match the 1600x1200 I can get on a 19 inch CRT I have to go up to over 20 inches.
Secondly there is the whole widescreen con. Widescreen means you get a worse screen area for a headline size and you also get considerablly worse utilisation of desk space. 4:3 LCDs are availible but they are expensive. Looking at dabs.com the cheapest 1600x1200 LCD is £244.38 while the chepest 1920x1200 LCD is 173.84)
Thirdly there is the resoloution change issue. For things like the windows desktop LCDs look like crap out of thier native resoloution. The subtle blur of the scaling realy tires the eyes. Unfortunately GUIs have generally not moved on from pixel based design so just increasing the size of GUI elements without increasing the resoloution is generally not very practical. In other words you have to decide how small you want your GUI to be when you buy the monitor and afterwards are basically stuck with that choice.
BTW does anyone make either a decent monitor with TV functionality (note: most HDTVs i've seen are crap as monitors, sometimes you can't even drive them from a PC in thier native resoloution, sometimes the VGA port is incrediblly fussy about resoloution and generally the native resoloution is too low to be a good monitor) or an external box to provide it to my PC monitor of choice.
TV functionality being defined as
* DVB-T tuner
* Analog pal tuner (not so vital but nice to have just in case)
* Composite or scart input supporting 576i 50hz and 480i 60hz
* Component input supporting all the normal pal and NTSC SD and HD resoloutions (in particular it MUST support 576i because for many virtual console games that is all the PAL wii will output).
* HDMI input supporting all the normal pal and NTSC SD and HD resoloutions.
* Upscaling to either the monitors native resoloution (if built into the monitor) or a resoloution/refresh combination most PC monitors will accept (if seperate)
Re:Plasma? (Score:4, Informative)