I got an email from a (to remain anony­mous) whole­saler today adver­tis­ing vol­ume (and not-so-volume) pric­ing of 17″ LCD screens, and was slightly shocked at how cheap they had become. I’ve been watch­ing the prices fall in recent times along with every­one else, of course, but hadn’t both­ered to check what the vol­ume pric­ing was doing, and recently had fallen behind even on off-the-shelf (“retail”) pricing.

Enough rant­ing about not much: The single-unit price is now $295 ex. GST (Aus­tralian dol­lars, of course), with vol­ume dis­counts kick­ing in at 20+ offer­ing sav­ings of $5 per unit. Is this reflect­ing increased LCD pro­duc­tion? I’d imag­ine so… given that this is very rapidly approach­ing the price of sim­i­larly sized CRT models.

At this stage, I’m pre­dict­ing the price dif­fer­ence between the two tech­nolo­gies will become neg­li­gi­ble some­time mid-2005, pro­duc­tion capac­ity per­mit­ting. Excit­ing stuff!