Many articles say that the costs of E-Ink display is already a threat to LCD.

Anybody knows how much does the E-Ink display cost to the e-book manufacturers?

I doubt it could be much of a threat, since the color screens haven't come up yet. Plus it's not backlit.

Many articles say that the costs of E-Ink display is already a threat to LCD.

Anybody knows how much does the E-Ink display cost to the e-book manufacturers?


Approximately $125 in single-unit quantities (for self-repair of e-ink readers - can be extraordinarily DIFFICULT to get supplier to sell such.)

Derek

I heard that last year Esquire Magazine included eink displays on the front of the their covers. It wasn't a really good one, it only flashes a few text, but it showed that it's cheap enough to be inserted into a $6 magazine.

If you look up online the price of screen replacement for ANY electronic is overly priced. Sometimes the screen replacement for a laptop cost more than half of the laptop itself. It's just the price you have to pay since there's a small market for it.

I would guess the eink display would cost the manufacture somewhere around $30 to $60.

One article about Kindle 2 said 60$ if I remember correctly.

It is on this link.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/22/isuppli-359-kindle-2-costs-185-to-build-whispernet-says-shhh/

The iSuppli tear down is very interesting. Thanks for sharing the news.

Does iSuppli normally analyze the tear down based on mass production? The news just reported last week that Amazon sold 300,000 since Feb... obviously iSuppli would not use that figure in their analysis. I guess the manufacturing cost probably even less expensive than analyzed.


Any thoughts? Do you think iSuppli's analysis is based on a low volume production?

Any thoughts? Do you think iSuppli's analysis is based on a low volume production?

My guess (no facts, just a guess) is that this is not a low volume estimate. We already know that (as mentioned above) replacing a screen on a broken unit runs $125 to $200.

Arguably, however, there is no such thing as high volume in e-ink screens. Notebook computer sales run over 100 million per year. Add in LCD screens for desktops, TV's, ipods/mp3's, others and you have many 100's of millions of LCDs sold each year.

Given Amazon's market leadership, and Kindle 2 sales of 300,000, I don't see how you can extrapolate more than five million E-ink devices and I personally figure that the number is around 2 million units. Furthermore, these are at 6 inch sizes whereas the laptops and TV's in LCD screens are substantially bigger. This means that total square inches of display screen produced per unit is many times larger.

My guess is that LCD screen production is more than 100 times higher in volume than e-ink screens (5 million versus 200+million is 40 times then factor in the larger form factor). As a result, I doubt very much that e-ink hits the manufacturing efficiencies of LCD -- even if the two technologies are equivalent in cost to manufacture.