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.
Plasma? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Or here? [isuppli.com]
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Plasmas seem to have become a new sort of discount category, with large, low priced plasmas saturating the market (like 40+" for $700). The downside is that they're 1024x768 usually, and are usually off-brands. And the whole burn-in thing makes me completely put off plasma altogether.
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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: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)
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:Plasma? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Plasma? (Score:5, Insightful)
Heh. Somebody's obviously not doing any graphics work.
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.
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Modern high-contrast LCD screens use much more power than equivalent CRTs.
Re:Plasma? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Plasma? (Score:5, Funny)
yea, but the colours on my LDC screen aren't nearly as good as the ones on my LSD screen.
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What are their clients viewing the graphics work on? Paper? or a LCD?
Serious question. Assuming they are better, does it really matter if your clients arent using them? I cant think of what media they could be publishing for where an LCD would be inferior /to the output/
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Gamut.
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.
CRTs for gaming? (Score:4, Insightful)
What about for gaming though? You're essentially capped at 60fps due to needing Vsync on LCD monitors to avoid massive shearing issues. Whereas a HQ CRT supports 100+hz.
The naked eye may not see more than 60fps, but there are definite fluidity gains still up to the 100-120fps range which LCDs can't match currently.
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Bullet spray in counter strike is directly affected by your frame rate.
The colt and ak just arent the same on 60 fps vs 100 fps.
I pull out the ol 21 inch CRT when i want to play CS. The technology still has its uses, but beyond that I would never go back to a CRT for normal every day use.
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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. Lo
Re:Plasma? (Score:4, Informative)
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If they fixed LCD prices, they probably fixed plasma prices too.
So how much did they make? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So how much did they make? (Score:5, Insightful)
...and how much are we the public going to see?
Re:So how much did they make? (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably a gift coupon for a $8 mouse. And a lollypop if you are lucky.
Re:So how much did they make? (Score:4, Funny)
what flavour lollipop? It is important for them to earn my forgiveness.
Re:So how much did they make? (Score:5, Funny)
It'll be ass flavoured. So you'll know what kissing their's would taste like.
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:So how much did they make? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's nice how the free market automagically corrects any abuses of the free market. I mean here were a bunch of companies colluding to overcharge for a product, and yet, magically, no consumers were harmed. Yay magical free market, thy invisible hand protects and looks after us all.
Re:So how much did they make? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except we're not in a free market. Republicans claim to be for a free market, but being pro established businesses does not a free market make. The patent system is also a big anti-free market force.
Also, free markets don't magically remove all price fixing. It only removes price fixing if the barriers of entry are lower then the opportunities presented by the price fixing.
And nobody has claimed free markets are perfect, just better then the alternatives.
Re:So how much did they make? (Score:4, Insightful)
And nobody has claimed free markets are perfect, just better then the alternatives.
It seems to me that all these yahoos arguing to "don't regulate, just let the market sort it out," are saying it's perfect by implication.
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Not to speak for or defend all yahoos, but I think that argument is saying that letting the market sort it out usually works out better than regulation, not that anything is perfect.
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Because the people who need it might not be able to afford it.
I understand that a little bit of deprivation is necessary to goad people to participate in the labor market. But the insurance model just won't fly as a true safety-net.
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Riiiiight. Because so many new LCD factories opened up in the last few years to take advantage of the amazing opportunity presented by price fixing. The free market works incredibly well in theory. If only it worked so well in the real world.
Re:So how much did they make? (Score:5, Insightful)
The free market works perfectly with perfect information. As long as there's not perfect information, there's no perfect market, and a "free" market needs watching from time to time.
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.
The Invisible Hand (Score:5, Insightful)
Another magic trick of modern totalitarianism, passing as democracy through massive propaganda, is that you believe in things that simply don't exist - like the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith's imagining meaning something it does not. Here's the quote:
By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.
So the invisible hand was Adam Smith's belief that an Englishman would buy English products produced in England, or start a manufacturing company in England for English consumers.
However, this loyalty to one's country simply isn't implicit anymore, if it was, ever. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel economist, states:
Whenever there are "externalities" - where the actions of an individual have impacts on others for which they do not pay or for which they are not compensated - markets will not work well. Some of the important instances have been long understood - environmental externalities. Markets, by themselves, will produce too much pollution. Markets, by themselves, will also produce too little basic research. (Remember, the government was responsible for financing most of the important scientific breakthroughs, including the internet and the first telegraph line, and most of the advances in bio-tech.)
But recent research has shown that these externalities are pervasive, whenever there is imperfect information or imperfect risk markets - that is always.
So, if you believe in a free market, globalization is very, very bad. GM is not failing because of the UAW (though they have many, many problems due to the UAW). GM is failing because it's being forced to compete with subsidized Japanese auto industry, and not receiving investment because of the inevitability of competing with Chinese automakers, which are a lot cheaper. Why? They can wreck their environment, exploit workers, and make unsafe products because China in many ways has a freer market than the US, if not a freer government. Why people are surprised that competition with third world countries wipes out entire manufacturing industries here at home, I'll never understand.
Repeat after me: I do not want a free market. I want a well regulated and competitive market that gives me the benefits of capitalist elements without wrecking the world in the process. I believe in liberty and equality and raising living standards for Americans, and trading with other nations so that they have the freedom to choose what they want to produce, not the "freedom" to sign up for another round of exploitation by Fortune 500 companies.
Anyway. There's good information on the Invisible Hand at the quite decent Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org], where I got my quotes from.
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What are you, some kind of a... (cue scary music) SOCIALIST? Heretic, the free market is God in America, how dare you question It? Would you put God in chains to mere mortal designs? Blasphemer!
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So the invisible hand was Adam Smith's belief that an Englishman would buy English products produced in England, or start a manufacturing company in England for English consumers.
That is not what is implied by Adam Smith's statement that you quoted. His statement implies that when a person makes business decisions based on whats best for him or his company, rather than his country, he will likely be benefiting his country in the long term. Conversely, if you make decisions based primarily on what you think is best for your country you will likely not be benefiting you or your country. This is due to the "invisible hand."
Re:So how much did they make? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, because the GP's lame argument means ipso facto that he is accurately representing free market economics.
Have you alerted the authorities to your blinding insight that oligarchies can temporarily fix prices even in a free market? No one has ever thought of that before.
Please, keep beating that strawman. You almost have me convinced.
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Of course screwing over others shouldn't be a crime if it interferes with corporate profits. Say, how come with all this price fixing, someone else didn't step in and offer LCDs for a lower price? That would have been proof that the free market works. Yet that never, ever seems to happen.
Ahhh, look! There's a 'world's smallest political quiz' link! Spoiler alert: you are a libertarian. I am a libertarian. Everyone who takes that quiz is secretly a libertarian.
If you start off with the assumption that anyone
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As do many other things, such as asymmetric information. A prospective employee knows more about his potential value than the employer does. Therefore, employers must systematically undervalue labor. In a free market system, capital always has an advantage over labor. Besides the asymmetric information problem, the labor market is not a cost free market. Leaving a job and picking another one is not like choosing another brand of car. There is a cost involved with leaving a job without another one lined up,
Re:So how much did they make? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
A market price that was based, in part, on the cost of the materials which, it turns out, were overpriced due to illegal price fixing.
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...and how much are we the public going to see?
$585 Million down, $699,415,000,000 to go...
The bailout will be paid for before you know it!
Ya Know... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ya Know... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ya Know... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ya Know... (Score:5, Funny)
... I'd expect this kind of BS from Sharp and LG but not from Chunghwa Picture Tubes.
It's almost to be expected. After the success of "Tubthumping", they were desperate for another avenue. Sadly, they had nowhere to go but down.
FYI: Chunghwa Picture Tubes is a division of... (Score:2, Funny)
Matsumura Fishworks and Tamaribuchi Heavy Manufacturing Concern
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Bad Timing for LG (Score:4, Funny)
I was just about to buy a new monitor for WotLK so I could quest easier (having quest info from wowhead on monitor A while gaming in windowed mode on monitor B).
Now I'm gonna definitely go with Samsung [futureshop.ca], because they are not involved in this lawsuit and therefore they must be rewarded for not getting caught. Anyone can tell that Samsung also does not pad their contrast ratios like LG obviously does. Who could believe a 10000:1 contrast ratio [futureshop.ca]? That's ridiculous! Samsung has decided to only push their padding to 8000:1 which respectfully identifies with the company's obvious higher level of integrity.
The Samsung even looks nicer!
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That's it, I'm tearing up all of my Chunghwa coupons.
But first, a number (Score:4, Funny)
Price drop (Score:5, Insightful)
"Perhaps this will cause the price of our TVs to drop?"
Um, except that they just added $585,000,000.00 to their cost of production, sure.
G.
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define artificially high. That seems to be a misunderstanding that the US legal system makes against semiconductor companies quite a bit lately. I don't think the courts are quite up to speed on the market situation. It's not that these guys raised prices, it's that they stopped them from falling, typically by organizing production stopage, and switch to new more profitable models, then the whole cycle begins again. In semiconductor manufacturing you always run your factory at full speed, that means at
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Artificially high == "colluding on prices to avoid market forces due to competition."
Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's why you shouldn't steal. The government hates competition!
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
I like paying taxes. My tax money buys me civilization. I just hate freeloaders who want civilization without paying for it. If you don't like civilization, don't live in it. There is plenty of unclaimed land all over the world where you can live without paying taxes to anyone. Have fun!
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Where's all this unclaimed land you speak of? Even Antarctica got sliced up like a huge frozen pie! Now, if you mean areas where no governmental (is that the same as civilization?) control is truly enforced, that's a different matter. (Somalia?)
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Somalia would be a great place for tax whiners to live. They could also live in Alaska out in the wilderness. Most of the word may be claimed, but it's not like it's being checked. All I care about is that said tax whiners do not get the benefits of things they didn't pay for. I don't care if there are actually any nice places for them to go live. What they do rather than being part of civilization isn't my problem, it's theirs.
Surely you don't have a problem with people claiming all that land. I mean, gove
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Right, nice one. No central governments to demand tax but you'll have to pay the local warlords (note: plural) simply not to kill you. Trading a tax on benifits for a tax on just living.
More great clear headed thinking, nothing a western tax department likes more than finding a tax cheat. You are still held to the laws of the land regardless.
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Re:Hmmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
I was responding to this quote, "That's why you shouldn't steal. The government hates competition!" which implies that taxation is equivalent to stealing. That is ludicrous, selfish, and anti-social. Taxation is equivalent to getting food in a restaurant, and paying for it afterwords. The 'Taxes are theft!' whiners want to dine and dash, they have already reaped the benefits of civilization but don't feel like they should pay.
I certainly don't always agree with what the government does with my money, but that still doesn't make taxation coercive. There are methods to change things that I don't like in government, and again, if you don't like the system you can drop out and not take part. Taxation is only coercive in libertarian fantasy land.
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Not making a judgment here, but noting your analogy is wrong. Taxation would be more like being forced food upon you (without you getting to choose what kind) and then being demanded you pay for it.
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Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
U.S. Department of Justice is levying the fines, so the money goes to the US Government. The Government will use the money to help bail out banks. ... that have no liquidity because of all the people who ran up their credit cards buying LCD televisions on credit and can't pay it back.
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... because they're out of jobs selling and delivering LCD TVs.
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Since its a fine imposed by the Justice Department, I would imagine the government gets the money (in part to defray the expense of filing and prosecuting the case).
Irony of irony, the advert displayed below the story was for the new Samsung HD TVs. :)
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$585 million? That should buy 1 more day for the DOD in Iraq.
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The attorneys.
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Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
AIG.
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Prices won't drop; profit margins may rise slightl (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Prices won't drop; profit margins may rise slig (Score:2, Insightful)
The cost was absorbed by the manufacturers of these devices, and if it drops, good for them... but do you really think they'll pass that directly on to consumers?
You really think they were absorbing the cost before? Still, I agree that any price drops will not exactly be through the floor.
Re:Prices won't drop; profit margins may rise slig (Score:2)
The cost of a mobile phone or iPhone is subsided through a contract with the network operator. You sign a three year contract, then the reduction from $400 to $100 is spread through the months at a rate of $8/month.
brazen (Score:2)
That's a pretty brazen FU to their consumers and to the law. I can't believe they got away with it for 5 years. What are the chances that $585M is going to find its way back to the consumers that were taken advantage of?
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Lol... (Score:3, Interesting)
And $50 says the CEO's won't be taking a dip in their salaries to compensate for the fine; nope, chances are they'll lay off some people and give pay cuts out to everyone that just does their job without trying to find a way to make a quick buck.
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"And $50 says the CEO's won't be taking a dip in their salaries to compensate for the fine; nope, chances are they'll lay off some people and give pay cuts out to everyone that just does their job without trying to find a way to make a quick buck."
Ahhh. I can tell that you must NOT be new here...I'd say your $50 will continue to be safe and warm in your pocket.
Here's hoping (Score:2)
Who gets the money? (Score:2)
I'm guessing that the people who bought laptops etc. with all those overpriced screens in them won't see a dime of it. Just a guess though.
Crazy Eddies LCD Emporium. (Score:2)
"Perhaps this will cause the price of our TVs to drop?""
I don't know if you're aware of this but the prices on LCDs have been dropping?
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yeah, i was hit on the head by an lcd price drop just the other day. i am going to carry an umbrella here on out.
No price drop for you! (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps this will cause the price of our TVs to drop?
Perhaps instead they will factor this cost into their new products in attempt to recoup this lost $$.
So the scenario is: Purchaser is hurt due to collusion and price fixing. Companies are caught. Purchaser is hurt due to fines.
Fines are only a deterrent if they actually hurt the companies bottom lines. If they can make enough profit during the price fixing phase, and jack up enough prices during the penalty phase to more than offset the penalty there will continue to be massive collusion in such systems.
Re:No price drop for you! (Score:5, Interesting)
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That would only be true if companies were complete monopolies and purchasers were FORCED to buy their products at a specific time... Neither is true.
If Samsung and LG raise prices, their competitors will benefit, getting more sales, AND consumers will see that prices are a bit high, and opt not to buy a new device with an LCD screen.
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That doesn't make sense. The price fixing happens because the overcapacity in the market would otherwise cause the price to drop. If the market were willing to pay a higher price, then they would simply increase the price of their products. They wouldn't wait until they're fined and they wouldn't collude in the first place.
Don't expect prices to rise any time soon. (Score:2)
(problem is, I'm not sure that I'm kidding).
Is this related? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does this have anything to do with the ridiculous inability of the laptop LCD screen market to put out 1920x1080 screens?
It's as though they're keeping the market for TV screens expensive by not allowing the format to bleed into laptop realm, wherupon cheap computers become high-quality televisions, killing the TV screen market.
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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.
Physical size (Score:3, Insightful)
Does this have anything to do with the ridiculous inability of the laptop LCD screen market to put out 1920x1080 screens?
As far as I can tell, the lack of 1080p-class LCDs in notebook computers has more to do with physical size than anything else. On a reasonably-sized laptop, you'd have to set your laptop on "huge fonts" in order to read text without squinting. Make it any bigger, and it's not a "laptop" as much as an iMac 24" with a fold-out keyboard. (But then I prefer netbooks anyway.)
More reason (Score:3, Interesting)
To shop more intelligently.
I *JUST* swapped out my CRT monitor after 8 years of solid, reliable use. I picked up a used LCD screen from my company for dirt cheap. I was never a beta tester for slow response-rate, burned out pixels and shoddy construction LCD screens.
I realize basic economics tells us, that there is a maximum profit point on the two line graph of units sold vs cost per unit, but dare I say they could have actually LOST money by charging too much, and forcing cheaper consumers out of the market.
meh, their loss.
Now their cost of business is increased (Score:3, Insightful)
Or maybe the price will remain the same as they now have reduced revenue and an increased cost per unit of the fine divided over the number of LCDs shipped. And I have bought a bunch of LCDs over the years. Think I will see any benefit? Doubtful! But maybe there will be a slight reduction in cost a while out. Current prices have already significantly dropped since this lawsuit was entered into.
Re:is 585M enough? (Score:4, Funny)
585M should be enough for anyone