Dell says it's staying in the LCD TV biz, but making changes
By Donald Melanson 
posted June 8th 2007 11:02AM
posted June 8th 2007 11:02AM
Well, that didn't take long. Just a day after rumors that Dell was planning to exit the LCD TV business started to circulate, the company has now come out and flatly denied them, although it does apparently have a few changes in store. The first of those is that Dell is now planning to only sell LCD TVs that are 37-inches or smaller under its own brand. To fill in that gap, Dell says it's planning to sell more TVs from other manufacturers, which it began doing in February with the addition of a number of Sony sets, along with models by Panasonic, Pioneer, Samsung, and ViewSonic. Presumably, this has no effect on their monitor business, which, at the rate things are going, should be passing the 37-inch mark any day now.
Makes sense. They only have to stock their own TV's and those are cheaper to ship (37" and smaller don't require freight shipping usually). The other brands can drop ship from a distributor
I think one of the biggest problems Dell has with selling LCDs is that people cannot walk into Best Buy or similar stores and actually see one. You have to first off know that Dell even makes TVs, then you have to visit the website and buy solely off that.
And if you're lucky, there may be a Dell kiosk in a mall near you so you can see it first hand.
And really. Who needs a 21-inch Wide screen Moniter? 19 is good enough for me.
The people that need large (20"+) monitors are, in general, looking for the higher resolution offered, not the size. I currently have a 17" UltraSharp from several years ago, and it works great for general purpose work/gaming/720p viewing. I would never buy a 19" because the extra 2" gets you nothing in terms of resolution, just increases the size of the pixels slightly.
That having been said, my next monitor will be a 24" unless they start fitting 1920x1200 screens in smaller form factors for desktop screens. The increase in resolution (from ~1 to ~2 million pixels on screen) is huge when you are editing 10 Mpx images. The 30" resolution would be even better, but I would also like to use the screen (on occasion) to view HDTV so having a native 1920 monitor is more attractive than stretching a 1080p film by a non-integer multiple to get to the 30" resolution.
I'll take my 37" 1080p westinghouse monitor over a 2560x1600 30" monitor kthanx dell.
why? 1600p kills 1080p. bigger is better? no.
Bigger is better. And I don't need the extra resolution right now, 1080p is enough for a few more years. Also, I don't have to buy the best video card possible just to run my games at the native resolution. In addition to all that, it also doubles as an analog monitor for vga/component.
@Ryan
For people who only surf the internet or play solitaire, yeah 19" is just fine. However, if you are a coder or work for a IT security firm that has numerous interfaces (monitoring consoles, client information repository, documentation on various technologies, etc.), a wide screen or multiple screen interface is great.
I love 17" DELL LCD TV. I works pretty well as a monitor and TV, plus it does a great job with PIP. Its great to watch TV and browse the web.
Can someone please explain to me why the 24" (1920x1200) widescreen displays cost double what the 20/22" (1680x1050) ones do? This just doesn't make sense. 30" being $1200, fine...but 24" being $600 and 20" being
I own a 32" Dell LCD TV and I love it! Beautiful picture and sound, plenty of hookups in the back, extremely easy to use. It's good that Dell isn't discontinuing the smaller models, because they're great TVs.
Have two of thoose Dell 2407 standing next to another... really makes the difference if you code or do illustration / vector graphics work.
Dell is good at manufacturing those screens and I think logistics (mentioned by david) are the main reason - Along with not getting lost in too many markets and making branding issues (in marketing terms) nearly impossible to solve.