How Did LCD displays get so economical?

[desura]

I remember when LCD screens often had dead pixels. Like in a typical 15 inch screen you could expect like 3 dead pixels, and manufacturers wouldn't replace a screen unless it had 10 dead pixels.

Nowadays we have 80 inch 4k tv's.

How did they manage this massive improvement?

 

[Wall Street]

Technology improvement and high volumes. After making hundred of millions of LCDs, the big panel makers have accumulated a lot of experience that helps them make them better. Panel production lines are updated ever few years to account for the latest tech. Also, because prices are always coming down, tech like IPS which has existed for a long time but only at the very high end has now become affordable enough to be in any cell phone.

 

[futurefields]

I feel in some ways TV's have gone downhill the past couple years, I think Panasonic peaked around 2011.

 

[desura]

Technology improvement and high volumes. After making hundred of millions of LCDs, the big panel makers have accumulated a lot of experience that helps them make them better. Panel production lines are updated ever few years to account for the latest tech. Also, because prices are always coming down, tech like IPS which has existed for a long time but only at the very high end has now become affordable enough to be in any cell phone.

Well, what I mean is that in the past, having a few pixels go bad because of dust when you have like a million is completely understandable.

But somehow they've managed to achieve incredibly good dust-suppression systems so that they're making huge LCD screens with hardly any dead pixels.

It must be a really impressive engineering victory to be able to control dust this well

 

[Mand]

Process engineering is a beautiful thing.

 

[easp]

Process engineering is a beautiful thing.

That, and overinvestment

 

[blastingcap]

I remember when LCD screens often had dead pixels. Like in a typical 15 inch screen you could expect like 3 dead pixels, and manufacturers wouldn't replace a screen unless it had 10 dead pixels.

Nowadays we have 80 inch 4k tv's.

How did they manage this massive improvement?

Because the Korean LCD makers found out that instead of throwing away "slightly defective" LCDs while building top-flight monitors for Apple and such, they could sell the slightly defective LCDs to second-tier monitor makers. This salvaging helps boost profits and enables them to lower prices for everybody.

I'm (mostly) joking.

 

[Bryf50]

Also by making them significantly worse. A low end TV or Laptop today will be cheaper but also likely worse than one a few years back. We're talking sub 200:1 contrast ratios, terrible colors, and hilariously narrow viewing angles. Thankfully things have recently started improving with IPS laptops and monitors being available for fairly cheap. There was a period though where it was hardly possible to find a laptop with a decent screen.

 

[bystander36]

Also by making them significantly worse. A low end TV or Laptop today will be cheaper but also likely worse than one a few years back. We're talking sub 200:1 contrast ratios, terrible colors, and hilariously narrow viewing angles. Thankfully things have recently started improving with IPS laptops and monitors being available for fairly cheap. There was a period though where it was hardly possible to find a laptop with a decent screen.

Laptop choices are likely not about being "cheaper" than before, but more about focusing on different things, such as lower power consumption, and higher resolutions.

 

[Hauk]

Laptop choices are likely not about being "cheaper" than before, but more about focusing on different things, such as lower power consumption, and higher resolutions.

Bryf50 has a point though, wish I'd never sold my old Dell XPS for this crappy screen gaming laptop I have now :|