Now you can buy an 80" HDTV that's more reliable...far better picture...uses 1/3 the amount of electricity for 1/10 the price.
Of course, the government selling off the frequency that analog SDTV’s used and forcing people to buy a new digital TV, all of which are HD, helped quite a bit in increasing HDTV sales and therefore bringing unit cost down.
I think some people might get mad, though, if the government went for the same strategy here and banned gasoline.
Of course, the government selling off the frequency that analog SDTV's used and forcing people to buy a new digital TV, all of which are HD, helped quite a bit in increasing HDTV sales and therefore bringing unit cost down.
The prices were coming down LONG BEFORE that. And almost all the cable companies have been broadcasting in digital for years. The government taking down the analog frequencies had almost zero impact on the price of the TVs.
HD also has nothing to do with a digital signal. You can still use your old analog sets with just a converter.
The automobile went from being an expensive toy of the rich to mass transportation because of natural market forces and technology development without the “help” of governement. Of the 3 types of propulsion, ICE, steam and electric, the ICE clearly won out.
We are now trying to force-feed a new technilogy and subsidize it into existence. I agree that some seed money is a good thing, but not even the Japanese government is underwriting electric cars. They have to stand on their own feet.
In the distant future we may have fuel cells, electric cars with super batteries, plug in hybrids and a combination of the above. If it was not for the gloabl warming scare and the government’s knee jerk reaction, there would not be any serious attemps at building cars only a few can afford and no one can drive any distance.
Mike, if lithium cells were going to drop in price, they’d have done so, they’re making them by the millions. So we’ll just disagree on that.
“Mike, if lithium cells were going to drop in price, they’d have done so, they’re making them by the millions.”
If cars use the same cells as computers, then I agree with you. For Tesla, this is true. But I don’t think that is true of other auto Li cells. These factories need to be paid for, and that could keep those battery prices high (e.g., Volt and Leaf; maybe Prius).
I would love to have a Frisker or Tesla, but not to rely on for transportation. I was close to buying a used Citicar–a completely electric car. It needed the battery replaced, and when I priced the battery, the car was still affordable. I wanted to see how it would work out on my 2 mile commute to work. However, I decided to stick with the tried and true internal combustion engine.
The prices were coming down LONG BEFORE that. And almost all the cable companies have been broadcasting in digital for years. The government taking down the analog frequencies had almost zero impact on the price of the TVs.
That isn’t accurate. A lot of people went out and bought TVs during the transition period;
HD also has nothing to do with a digital signal. You can still use your old analog sets with just a converter.
Except that they’re making digital TV’s HDTVs, not SDTVs. While you can use the old analog set with a converter, many people chose not to go that route, because unless you signed up for the government rebate program, you had to pay $100 or so for one, and at that point a lot of people decided just to upgrade sets.
HDTV was actually in a somewhat similar boat that Bluray is now - people were only going to buy an HDTV when their old SDTV broke. the government yanking the analog signal spectrum accelerated that changeover.
That isn't accurate. A lot of people went out and bought TVs during the transition period;
I don’t disagree that people bought new TV’s during the transition period. The point I made is that HDTV prices dropped a lot long before the analog channels went away. Sure they’ve dropped since then…but the biggest drop by far happened LONG BEFORE the switch. The point is that the analog switch had little to nothing of the price drop.
Price drop of HDTV from the time they were introduced to before the analog channel switch…was over several thousands. During and after the switch maybe $300.
@MikeInNH ; He’s right; I remember living in Malaysia in 2000, long before difgital and HD arrived in that country. A large widescreen Sony TV sold for about $15,000 there and some rich people bought them. At the Kuala Lumpur airport 3 different TV manufacturers put in these large screens for free to get the exposure.
Now that same large screen here TV sells for about $1400, and has a lot of additional features. We bought one, a High Resolution Panasonic Viera 50" to watch the 2008 Olympic games. We paid $2900 for it.
Lithium batteries are being made in huge numbers, mostly with automated process machinery and very little labor for every battery powered device we buy. The cost is in the materials not NRE, not in volume manufacture. The cost is in materiels and material commodity prices are not going down, they are going up. This is another technical roadblock that must be overcome. All steps have increased capacity, decreased weight and improved charging times but increased costs for each step; lead-acid, Ni-Cad, Nickel-metal Hydride, and Lithium based batteries.
When a new plant opens, it has to be paid for before the owner can make money while dropping the price. Since Li cells for autos are new, extra capacity is needed.
Who says a new plant has to be open. Maybe a new line in an existing plant. Companies do that all the time.
When somebody spends money to build more of something, they don’t get to charge more than the market will bear (see the articles on how much each Volt ‘costs’ GM). They won’t build the plant if the expected price won’t cover the cost of the plant over some reasonable period.
http://www.twocentspermile.org/?p=2411
http://www.evchargernews.com/miscfiles/sce-rav4ev-100k.pdf
As you can see, because of the “contributions” by today’s energy corporations, the EV has taken a step backwards. The very last thing our corporate controlled society needs is a viable electric vehicle. It seems the average car buyer is still better off buying a Corolla.
Texases makes a good point. I would take it a step further and say the investment in the Volt plant was never intended to be recouped by the sale of EVs but as an advertisement ploy and necessary response to the auto bailout. Check the requirements of the loan and you will see the Volt matches those for range…and not one mile more when more could be done, easily. No interest, just politics at the expense of your and my tax dollars.
Shadow, the government is not the reason that we can buy LCD TVs with digital tuners and HD capability for $150 and less. Quite the contrary, the marketplace did that. If there’d been government intervention I doubt if it owuld have happened. TV manufacturers’ lawers would probably just onw be in the process of trying to interpret 3000 pages of new regulations.
As to their banning analog, well, that’s a different discussion.
Arguing that market forces brought prices of the televisions down is fine, and 100% accurate. However, if the government had not mandated the shut-down of the old analog signals, thus requiring customers to make an immediate purchasing decision, those market forces would have taken longer to be effective. A large number of customers chose to replace their old TVs when that happened rather than fool with a set-top D/A converter.
I’m not saying the prices would not have dropped eventually - just that it would not have happened as fast as it did if the government hadn’t essentially bricked every old TV set in the nation.
Speaking personally I couldn’t care less about the HD vs SD resolution issue (because for a lot of television programming, all HD did was to make sharper, higher-definition pablum), and, especially since I don’t watch a whole lot of television (working in the business kind of makes you want to avoid it when you’re not at work) I’d have kept my old analog Toshiba CRT until it died, which probably would have been some time after I retire. Instead, I went out and bought a fancy newfangled HDTV that I would never have bought otherwise, and therefore contributed to the volume-inventory-movement that brought prices down.
And note that I’m looking at the time period after the initial rollout of HDTV’s, when they were 15 grand. The price of any new technology is astronomical, and then it comes down to only “damn, that’s expensive!” before mass adoption leads to prices that are actually on the low side. Even the first “mass market” home computer, the Altair, was almost $500 back in 1975 (or more than 2 grand today), and that didn’t come with a screen (nor could it use one until someone came out with an adapter card for it), a keyboard, a mouse, and you had to solder it together yourself. Now you can go out and drop $500 and get a whole computer that runs circles around anything available back then, everything included, even a printer.
What brought the price of TVs down ? Chinese sweatshop labor can’t be discounted, and we all have a hand in it while hiding under the guise of " the market place".
I’m not so sure I agree. In my area, Comcast provided free analog/digital converter boxes for each TV up to three, so the price of the conversion to digital is free. HD requires the new sets, but I don;t have it even though I have two new sets. I figure that my eyesight is no longer good enough to justify it.
I think the cost came down due to very low mass production costs, which drove out CRTs anyway. . CRTs are expensive to manufacture. Computer technology is actually a great example. Costs dropped dramatically totally without government intervention. That industry was the driving force behind LCD acreens, as a matter of fact. That and INTEL chips made computers dirt cheap. A chip the size of my thumbnail now contains an incomprehensible number of transisters. Thousands, perhaps even millions, of times what he original chip did. And now they’re playing in the lab with carbonium, which is a layer of carbon 1 atom thick They claim that the free electrons fly around the material’s surface virtually without resistance at room temperature.
And it was all done 100% without government intervention.
Free converter box ? If it says “made in China, or Mexico " by labor payed .25 an hour, or less, you’re right. It is done without govt. interference. Ours and the country from where it came. The dirty little secrete, the elephant in the room is that the average middle class person gets all these great deals on the backs of " not so free market” labor. If it were “made in America” it would not be so free. Besides, Comcast makes money on the end through your subscription, financed by cheap labor.
Invested in Global Tech or got a Samsung TV or Apple product?