Not sure this is the right forum but here it is. About 4 years ago I bought a 1920x1200 lcd screen from Samsung for about 300$. I can't seem to find any screen with the same dimensions anymore under 450$.
Why is there such a rarity for 16:10 screens?
The dimension change is due to an industrial "change".
In 2008 the computer industry started to use 16:9 as standard aspect ratio for monitors and laptops. According to a report by displaysearch the reasons for this were/are:[5][6]
- Innovative product concepts drives a new product cycle and stimulating the growth of the notebook PC and LCD monitor market.
- 16:9 provides better economic cut (panelization) in existing TFT LCD fabs.
- 16:9 products provide higher resolution and wider aspect ratio.[7]
- The widespread adoption of High Definition in the consumer entertainment sector will help end users readily adopt the new products with the wider aspect ratio.
- The 16:9 panels provide an opportunity for PC brands to further diversify their products.
They are getting slightly cheaper - I am tempted to buy a 1920x1200 Dell IPS which is about £300 at the moment (still over twice as much as a regular monitor).
1920x1080 panel facilities exist because of a huge demand in televisions, and, so, the panels can be reused cheaply in computer monitors.
1920x1200 isn't really existent for consumer electronics and as 1920x1080 is "good enough" for the majority of people, so, 1920x1200 panels are a lot more expensive (due to the much higher manufacturing costs).
All this being said, it all comes down to supply and demand!
One could ask the same about oil prices, food prices, ... anything.
Prices vary according, to make long story short, to technical criteria, market criteria, ... lots of them. They were cheaper, now they're more expensive.
There were a lot of such cases through history. First one that comes to mind was a case when (Hyundai's?) factory that made memory chips burned down ... also afffected the market in the following years.
It's probably also fair to say that the LCD screen you bought 4 years ago is not the same LCD screen you would be buying today. LCDs, as everyone knows, generate no light of their own but simply refract existing light, so they need to be backlit in order to display information to human eyes. It would be useful to research what sort of backlight and overall lifetime guarantees are being made by the new displays, just to be sure you're really comparing oranges to oranges.
