Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffreylamster
Any thoughts? Do you think iSuppli's analysis is based on a low volume production?
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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.