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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PMS Witch who wrote (114144)	4/4/1999 1:43:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

PW - I have a surprise for you - in all likelihood, most DELL products do indeed have "a few bad memory chips", and some "senile ROM", and almost certainly bad blocks on the disk drives. These are simply masked by correction algorithms such as remapping. Unfortunately that doesn't work for display technology. The "few bad pixels" LCD story is a part of the relentless drive to bigger LCD screens with higher resolution. There is a huge demand for the big screens and the industry is constrained by supply. The percentage of "perfect" LCD panels in the large sizes is about 20%. There is a curve of yield which follows the typical bell-shaped curve. The center of that curve, with current manufacturing technology, is about 15 bad pixels on a 1024x768 display. Given that such a display has more than 786,000 pixels, this is not bad on a percentage basis - something like .002% bad. Memory and other micro technology has always had this problem. Large memory chips are fabricated with a number of spare cells which can be "mapped in" to correct for bad cells. But that doesn't work for display technology - the bad cells are there for all to see. So manufacturers set upper limits for what they will accept. If DELL constrained themselves to only "perfect" LCD panels, they would have less than half of the available product in the hottest segments of the laptop business. That's just not good business when most people don't care. An alternative would be to have a separate model with "perfect" pixels, and charge a higher price for it. But that's an impossible problem - you position the lower priced product as junk. So the practice is to set standards that meet then needs of most users, and count on excellent customer service to satisfy those customers who seek perfection. DELL quality control is well above the industry average in this regard.

To: PMS Witch who wrote (114144)	4/4/1999 2:14:00 PM
From: John F. Dowd	Respond to of 176387

PMS: Compaq's LCD looks like the best- will it work with a Dell machine i.e. is the video driver and port built to the same standard. JFD