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Flat-Screen Prices Still, Well, Flat; Some Even Rise
Electronics | Mar 6, 08
Late in January I observed that some popular flat-screen televisions had risen in price in the post-holiday, pre-SuperBowl period, and this trend seems to be continuing.
Then as now, the most popular plasma television on this site was the 50 inch Panasonic TH-50PZ700U. As can be seen from the graph below, February and the start of March have brought little change to the average and lowest offered price for this set.
Time Period: 4/16/2007 through 3/3/2008
Each tick mark represents one week
Red = High Price, Blue = Average Price, Green = Low Price
It's a similar story for the then-most popular LCD set on PriceSCAN (now the second-most sought-after on our site), the 52 inch Samsung LN-T5271F, whose average price has actually gone up over the last two weeks.
Time Period: 9/3/2007 through 3/3/2008
Each tick mark represents one week
Red = High Price, Blue = Average Price, Green = Low Price
It's worth noting that the current most popular LCD television on PriceSCAN, Sony's KDL-52XBR4 52 inch BRAVIA XBR High Definition LCD WEGA, has dropped appreciably in price over the last two months (perhaps helping to account for its rise in relative popularity), though it has recently shown signs of stabilizing.
Flat-screen price firming is borne out in the behavior of the PriceSCAN LCD and Plasma indices. Interestingly, in the case the 50-inch plasma indices, the 720p sets have appreciated sharply relative to 1080p televisions, perhaps indicating that the former fell too far, too fast relative to the higher-definition later.
Five weeks ago I speculated that January's flat screen price hikes/stabilization might have been influenced by the then-upcoming SuperBowl, and this might indeed have been the case. Yet the persistence of these phenomena suggests other factors may be at work, including perhaps next year's switch to digital transmission and, more ominously, the looming shadow of inflation, now beginning to spread to portions of the technology sector.
Posted by jeffrey.trester (Permalink)
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