Sales & Savings

Today’s Dell Deal: 24″ LCD for only $199

Normally $279, Dell is offering their S2409w 1080p LCD Monitor for $199 plus free shipping. (Thanks TechDealDigger)

These deals are usually dictated by a fixed supply and tend to last about 3 days. Be sure to act soon if you’re in the mood for a new display.

Quality Color Laser Printer for $249?

Dell Home is offering the Dell 2130cn Color Laser Printer for just $249 after a $100 instant rebate.  This printer can produce up to 20 pages per minute in black, 16 in color and has a monthly duty cycle 40,000 pages.

Why mention this here? Well, my current laser printer is having problems and have been shopping for a replacement. A decent Home/office laser has gone up in price and I’m seeing comparable replacements at least $200-$250. So to find a full color printer for the same price? I start paying attention.

Note: When purchasing any color device, be sure to check into the per page ink costs. Some printers, ink jets especially, become very expensive when printing in full color. The black cartridge retails for $70 and would cost $.028 per page (not bad/not great), however, non-Dell toner can be purchased for as low as $20 making this quite reasonable for Black-and-white printing. The color toner is rated at $.14 / page, again not great, and saw non-dell replacements for $40-$50 getting that down to $.07/page.

Predicting the crazy ‘Black Friday’ Sales

We here at the Dell Observer are all about helping you learn how Dell prices it products and when to expect the best deals on various Dell merchandise.

The experienced shoppers out there are well versed in how “Black Friday” works. For those not in the know, retailers put on special limited volume price promotions on the Friday after Thanksgiving to drive traffic into their stores and hopefully jumpstart their holiday sales.

GottaDeal.com posted a great analysis today on some of the trends they expect to see. Suggest you read the whole article. However, some highlights:

• Look for very agressive discounts this year. Black Friday is occuring later this year and retailers will have to drive an incredible amount of sales in a shorter period of time.
•  Great deals on HDTV’s. They expect to see promotions for 720P 42″ HD displays between $399 and $499 with 50″ plasmas at $599. (I paid $1200 for mine just 2 years ago). Expect to spend over $100 more for 1080p resolution.
• Wild notebook and netbook deals. They predict a few netbook offers (Intel Atom) as low as $149 and full featured Dual Core notebooks as low as $299. (15.4″, 2GB RAM, 160GB HD + Optical)
• Continued price drops on LCD Displays. 19″ Displays as low as $69 and trending up to $149 for 24″ LCD’s.

We’ll keep an eye out and update these predictions as we get closer to the holiday shopping season!

Dell Multifunction Printer only $29

Need an inexpensive multifunction inkjet printer?

Dell.com is offering its V105 for ONLY $29 (+tax and shipping).

Dell has lowest pricing on latest game consoles

Dell has always had a robust Software & Peripherals (S&P) business, selling all manner of consumer (printers, TV’s, cameras, etc…) and business (printers, storage, etc…) products.

What many folks don’t know is that many of their coupons allow for significant discounting of both computers and the S&P items, with some of the S&P items at or below cost.

If you’re in the market for a game console – perhaps the new PS3 Slim or latest Xbox, Joystiq reports that you can get a PS3 Slim for just $254 (list $299) and an Xbox Pro for $212 (list $250) or Xbox Arcade for a mere $170. Just use coupon code 6FWJ247J1P44CK.

Dell raising computer prices?

Not something you see everyday….

I came across this post at Liliputing… turns out that Dell raised the price on their Inspiron 11Z notebook/netbook by $50.

Pricing in the computer industry is more of an art, than a science. You try to figure out what competitors are pricing at, how much demand there will be for a certain product and also to manage your manufacturing / supply chain so you sell what you produce and not have inventory shortages or excess.

Will be interesting to see what drove this? Did Dell get a good response and start to run out of inventory? Or did it hit the holy grail and find that customers were glad to pony up $50 more for the same product (pure profit to the company)