Topic: How much do the screens cost?

[joeamis]

I may be alone but I'm not so impressed with the whole 2 screens idea.
I was wondering about how much each screen costs for the handheld...?
could anyone give a ballpark figure?

See the thing is I would rather have a better processor
or one screen with a better resolution than having 2 screens...
and this could be done ofcourse if they diverted the money from
the 2nd screen idea...

I dunno it's just me, but thats what I'd prefer

[jasonditz]

If you're buying the screens retail, probably $15-$20.

If you're buying them in Nintendo size volumes (figure a minimum 5 million for a worldwide launch) probably a couple bucks each.

Better resolution probably isn't going to be terribly meaningful when you're talking about a screen that small. Better processor might be possible, but I'm assuming the ones chosen were picked not only for power, but maturity of development environment (and high volume availability).
Honestly the CPUs are probably better than what the N64 offered (certainly easier to optimize for), so I don't think CPU cycles is going to be a limiting factor in too much. The only possible benefit would be uncompressing data on the fly. Frankly, with the evidently high capacity of the game media, that's probably not going to be terribly neccesary (the thing can probably do DivX decompression in real time for a screen as small as it is).

[joeamis]

i find it hard to believe that the screens could cost only a couple bucks each.
from past interviews I've learned that the screens are some of
the most expensive parts of a portable system.

by your logic if screens cost a couple bucks that would mean
that a gba sp's components minus the screen cost 98% of the total
cost. that doesn't make sense given the price and the specs.

this brings up another discussion:
nintendo forgone the use of front lit screens for almost 15 years in their
portables because of battery life, now with two screens for the DS which
I have no doubt will be front-lit, they're going to have to raise
costs again by including a powerful rechargeable battery which
will up the costs even more to a large degree.

[jasonditz]

"by your logic if screens cost a couple bucks that would mean
that a gba sp's components minus the screen cost 98% of the total
cost. that doesn't make sense given the price and the specs."

Actually you're forgetting the fairly significant cost of assembling the systems and shipping them all over the world.

The battery issue is an interesting one too, but:

Nintendo has in the past vastly overstated the battery drain lighting the screen has. Take an old model GBA and stick an Afterburner kit in it. Battery life goes down, but not THAT much. The reason the Gameboy had so much better battery life than some of its competitors was not screen lighting, but lower power components (which is again, a key reason why the processors aren't more powerful).

In addition, rechargable battery technology has improved by leaps and bounds in the past few years. We can safely assume that the DS is larger than SP... so the battery pack can also be larger. Putting two SP battery packs in (or the equivalent single pack) probably would be reasonable in the space alloted, and would provide more than enough power for the unit.  

[joeamis]

good point but even so, I'd think the screens cost more than about 2 dollars.

the rechargeable battery for the DS is going to have to be pretty powerful,
alot more than two for the SP.
The SP is running one screen, lower in resolution than the screens
for the DS, and the SP is running one 33 mhz processor while the DS
is running that same processor plus a 66 mhz processor.
(hypothetical specs, but the real spec difference between the two
will probably be quite similar)

edit*** battery consumption increases at an exponential rate
with two of the same devices drawing power from it.  
2nd edit***that comment is false, i forgot my physics knowledge...

[Bill Aurion]

are you talking about the lcd display, or the plastic screens themselves?  If just the screens, then yeah they are pretty cheap to produce...

[joeamis]

I was talking about the LCD's

lowest common denominator in math, what's this about screens?
seriously though, the liquid crystal displays

[jasonditz]

The plastic screens probably cost literally pennies. The LCDs might be somewhat more than $2, but I'd be shocked if they were more than $5 in multimillion unit volumes. You could buy similar resolution screens for $15-$20 in single units pretty readily, electronic components always have similar markups.

[joeamis]

okay that seems about right, $5
at first thought i was thinking more but after
your remarks I adjusted my thinking to
believing it to be around that mark.

After all this though, it'd be pretty sweet
if we could find out the exact figure
call it my geekness but lol that's just me

[jasonditz]

I tried to ask a couple friends of mine but never got a satisfactory answer. They could give me an about $10 per deal if I bought 1000+ units, and said there probably would be a better deal if you were buying much larger amounts, but none of them is high enough up in their respective companies to handle that large a sale.