Samsung Buys Sony's Stake In LCD Joint Venture

First time accepted submitter rtoz writes "Samsung Electronics has decided to buy out Sony's entire stake in their Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) joint venture. S-LCD Samsung will pay Sony 1.08 trillion won ($939m; £600m) in cash for Sony's entire stake (50% – 1 shares) in S-LCD Corp., a venture formed in 2004 to make TV panels. After acquisition, Samsung Electronics' stake in S-LCD will be 100%. The move comes as Sony has been restructuring its TV business, which has been making a loss for the past seven years."

So what determines quality?

[Pagey123]

Forgive my ignorance, but I've never followed the LCD and/or HDTV market closely, so these may be silly questions with obvious answers. I will assume (correct me if I am wrong) that there's some consolidation in the LCD TV industry and that most "manufacturers" get their panels from only a handful of sources. If that is in fact the case, what variables actually go into determining the quality of a unit? For example, I've read several "rumors" that Samsung once upon a time had a ton of bad caps on some model(s) that gave consumers a lot of grief. Just curious, so thanks for the insight!

Foxconn Labor + Samsung Patent = Sony Odd Man Out

[retroworks]

Samsung has an Intel-like proprietary stake with many of the boards used in LCD and plasma production, and everyone is using Foxconn factories to assemble and produce. Sony is a major brand value but trying to keep ownership of actual LCD display production was an expensive gamble. Hopefully they put some of the trillion into R&D. Their mhttp://slashdot.org/story/11/12/26/1238225/samsung-buys-sonys-stake-in-lcd-joint-venture#ove to make content (Sony Pictures and Playstation games) was a better investment than hardware.