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Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

>I just found a 7-inch tablet for £28 ($43.10) on Amazon (plus a camera and RAM and stuff). Including taxes and shipping. Why is this so expensive?

Sales volumes determine economies of scale, it is likely the £28 tablet was made in quantities much larger than the pi screen (I'd guess at least 2 orders of magnitude).

Also, not all screens are equal. It's not just resolution: there's colour reproduction, viewing angles, brightness, contrast and response time. On the non-technical side mentioned on the blog, they mentioned they wanted a manufacture who would make the panel for a long time. I would bet a dollar that Pi screen beats the £28-tablet display on all the above parameters

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> there's colour reproduction, viewing angles, brightness, contrast and response time.

Which seem to be all crap for this panel anyway – 70° viewing angles implies it's the cheapest TN panel they could find.

For a non-profit(!) like the RPi foundation that can neither guarantee sales nor buy them in advance in massive bulks, availability is the only factor that really matters.

Indeed. They mention it's an "industrial" panel, which in my experience seems to mean "low contrast and brightness, narrow viewing angle, but wider temperature range[1]". The Innolux panel I mentioned in another comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10185433 ) is an example of this type.

[1] http://www.pacificdisplay.com/lcd_temp_range.htm

But the £28 one comes with RAM, CPU, wifi sensor, camera, and it's two thirds of the price. Even if the other screen specs (brightness, viewing angle etc) are really terrible on the £28-tablet and incredible on the raspberry pi display, this still seems very expensive, and the difference seems like more than just an economy of scale thing.

I mentioned 3 things that might explain the price difference in my comment, not just economies of scale. I should have been clearer

1. Economies of scale

2. Difference in quality of the display

3. Booking factory capacity in advance (there's likely a huge opportunity cost to the manufacturer)

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