- Making a 101-inch micro-LED may cost over $50K.. according to a report…
- …and that’s just the pure manufacturing cost
- The cost is all in the panel, so don’t expect it to change imminently
We’re quite excited by the potential of micro-LED TVs, the premium TV tech currently being showcased by firms such as Hisense with its spectacular 163-inch micro-LED and Samsung’s cool idea for a micro-LED TV where the bezel is also a screen.
We’ve always been a bit less excited by how much every released model costs, however, since they’ve run regularly towards or into, six figures – and that hasn’t changed much over time. Now a new breakdown of how much these TVs cost to make today has had us wincing, and makes clear that we shouldn’t expect much of a change, because the hardest and expensive part is the part unique to micro-LED.
The new report comes from the respected UBI Research firm, and it’s called “101-inch Micro-LED TV Set BOM Analysis Report… Signaling a Game Changer for the Consumer Electronics Market”.
BOM is short for Bill of Materials, and the report suggests that there’s nothing micro about the BOM for a micro-LED TV.
According to UBI, the BOM for a 101-inch micro-LED TV will be in the region of $52,000 (about £38,550 / AU$73,815). And that’s just the manufacturing cost. There are all the other costs, and the manufacturer’s profit, to go on top – in a best-case scenario, the BOM is often around half the cost of a TV set, though it can be less.
Hence why we’re looking at around $100,00 for a 100-inch micro-LED, and compare that to $5,999 for the TCL QM9K mini-LED at 98 inches, $24,999 for the 97-inch LG G5 OLED TV, or $29,999 for the 116-inch Hisense 116UX next-gen RGB TV.
Why does micro-LED cost so much?
The analysis breaks down the BOM to 46 different items, and calculates that in a 101-inch TV, the panel materials that include the micro-LED pixels will account for 86.2% of the total BOM.
In dollars, the backplane costs $15,932 and the pixel layer $28,913. The mainboard is $4,188, the driving circuit module $1,168, the backing plate $1,325, the frontplane $501 and the frame $9.
One of the reasons the main panel components cost so much is because of manufacturing efficiency and scale: established technologies such as OLED and mini-LED panels are made in big numbers and production has become much more efficient with less wastage. (Though OLED still struggles with this much more than mini-LED.) So prices have come down.
According to Dr. Joohan Kim, Senior Analyst at UBI Research, “For Micro-LED TVs to become mainstream in the large-size premium market, improving process yield and reducing cost through vertical integration will be essential.”
However, TechRadar has been told that micro-LED has a similar problem to OLED had for years, in that the core materials are really hard to produce, and haven’t improved majorly in cost reductions and difficulty to produce – so the changes Dr. Kim says need to happen look to be some way off.
But when that happens, eventually, the future for the tech is very bright indeed. As UBI explains, micro-LED’s self-emissive structure scales delivers “virtually unlimited scalability beyond 100 inches while delivering perfect black performance.”
Micro-LED is great for really big displays because it lends itself well to modular designs, with multiple smaller panels being stitched together to create something much larger.
That modularity is likely to be what eventually brings manufacturing costs down: it’s much easier to make smaller modular panels than single, massive ones.
We’re still being told by TV manufacturers that it’ll be five years or so before micro-LED becomes mainstream, but some on the team are skeptical that these costs can come down fast enough – so if like me you have much more modest ambitions and spending power, you might want to stick with the tech in the current best TVs instead.
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