The market is pretty good at driving down costs if it's possible to do so. As a designer of an OLED computer, I can tell you that if we could afford to offer it at a lower price, we would do so in a heartbeat. But no realistic increase in volume of sales would have much effect on our costs. I can give you the reasons, including the big killer, which is the realities of scale in the electronics and diving markets:
1) First, not all OLED screens are created equal or are equally expensive. Passive matrix OLED screens cost less, but are typically single color displays. The oximeter the original poster linked to appears to be passive matrix.
2) Active matrix (AMOLED) screens are typically full color, are very expensive compared to other displays and have few manufacturers, partly because the processes have had quite low yields. The entire industry is in the process of retooling now to improve this, and costs will (we hope) come down, but we are talking a few years here. LCD televisions and computer monitors went through a similar process- costs came down when manufacturing processes improved, not when manufacturers stopped being greedy.
3) The one manufacturer that seems to have the best process is using most of their production in their own products, and will not talk to customers who won't guarantee purchases of 200,000 per month or more. For comparison, PADI says they certified about 75,000 divers per month in 2010- worldwide.
4) The consumer products you see with OLED or AMOLED screens at lower prices are either large volume products (almost anything is far larger volume than diving) and/ or are, like cellphones, subsidized by subscription charges that mask the true cost of the hardware.
Most divers have no sense of how tiny the diving market is. If a dive computer were able to capture 100% of the market, it would still be an infinitesimally tiny blip- utterly invisible- in the consumer electronics world. Anything you see in a mass market retailer is being sold at volumes that dwarf the biggest selling products in diving. The unit cost to manufacture consumer electronics is therefore much, much less. Consumer electronics manufacturers and retailers can operate off far thinner profit margins than diving (ask your LDS if they could keep the doors open on a 5-15% markup) because they can have volumes in the hundreds of thousands or millions, even for specialized products like oximeters.
Apart from the screens, it takes a lot more software development and hardware to run a full color display, and those costs must be amortized over a very small production run and with a highly dispersed distribution. Producing sophisticated electronic devices at this scale is very, very expensive. I can guarantee you that the % profit margin on the typical cheap segment based display dive computers is bigger than on Atomic's Cobalt- or any of the other AMOLED computers.
Comparing costs in the diving market to consumer electronics is just not going to tell you anything useful. I wish it were not so, but unless we can convince as many people to dive as watch TV, we are in a small market, and sophisticated design will be expensive.
