I suppose that the current trend for sticking hundreds of gigs of the little beasties into boxes with a SATA port on one end could be important here. This coupled with the mass dash of the storage vendors to outdo each other on how many terabytes of such they can then shove into a rack could easily take up any slack due to the economic downturn. One multi-terabyte flash storage sale is a heck of a lot of iPods, cameras and USB sticks.

If it weren't for the recession taking the shine off the consumer market and putting a crimp in Data Centre investment, I'd have expected flash to be on a par with unobtanium-plated rocking horse shit around now.

I just bought a new HP 23 inch LCD screen, HP 2309m, 1920 x 1080, HDMI, Digital, VGA, nice inbuilt speakers, very very good quality 3000:1 contrast.

For 230 Euros.

It's not even the cheapest, they do a HP one with 1000:1 contrast and fewer ports for 189 euros, that's before you start going for the crappier brands.

Plumet plumet plumet.....

That's less than half the price of a year ago, although I suspect a lot of the cause is the recession.

It's relatively cheap too because that's a 16:9 panel rather than a full 16:10 (i.e. 1920 x 1200) - do you know what type of panel it is? May not be as good as you think it is...