Flat Chance
Prices on cool TVs are dropping as new factories come on line. Is now the time to buy?
BY MICHAEL SCHUMAN
Doug Gale, a 30-year-old Dallas banker, returned from a vacation to Tokyo and Hong Kong in 2001 raving as much about TV sets as about ancient temples, towering skyscrapers and exotic food. A self-proclaimed tech geek, Gale scouted out electronics shops and was mesmerized by flat-screen TVs. Their monstrous sizes, sleek designs and flashy displays were perfect, he thought, for watching his favorite Dallas Stars charge down the ice. "I'd never seen anything like them," he says of the TVs. "They were just phenomenal. As soon as I got back to Dallas I was thinking, 'I got to get me one of these!'"
Three years later, Gale's living room is still dominated by an old picture-tube clunker. He routinely stops in Best Buy and Circuit City stores to compare prices, but the model he craves, a 45-in. (114-cm) cutting-edge liquid-crystal display (LCD) TV, has a $7,000 price tag—twice what Gale is willing to spend. "These things are still prohibitively expensive," Gale laments.
Sound familiar? While it seems as though hordes of couch potatoes are snapping up the latest displays, the wonders of LCD and plasma TV technology are still well out of reach for the average shopper. True, at U.S. retailer Circuit City, sales of flat-TV models have tripled over the past year, prompting CEO W. Alan McCollough to label this Christmas "a flat-panel holiday." But as long as the price tag on a flat-screen TV is four or more times as much as a comparable tube TV, many consumers will drool and dream but not bite. "Prices [of flat TVs] will be cheaper for consumers this holiday season, but not cheap enough to have them explode off the shelves," says Chris Connery, vice president of market research at DisplaySearch, a consulting firm based in Austin, Texas. more...
