Nintendo 3DS costs $103 to make

GAMES CONSOLE MANUFACTURER Nintendo spends just over $100 on components for its latest 3DS handheld games console.

Nintendo's most recent handheld wonder tipped up last week retailing around the £180 mark, with a bill of materials that is 33 per cent higher than its previous DSi handheld console. Analyst outfit Isuppli found that the total manufacturing cost of the Nintendo 3DS is $103.25, of which $100.71 goes towards materials.

It won't be too great a surprise that Isuppli found the two displays, one of which is a 3.5-inch 800x240 pixel '3D' display and the secondary conventional LCD display, both from Sharp, are the most expensive components on the 3DS. The two screens come in at $33.80, or 33 per cent of the total bill of materials (BOM).

It seems that Nintendo has relied on Sharp for more than just screens, with Isuppli claiming the processor, accounting for $10 of the total BOM, is also fabricated by Sharp. Isuppli said that with such a price, the 3DS processor is 15 per cent more expensive than the equivalent found in the Nintendo DSi.

Isuppli attributed the 8.3 per cent increase in memory costs in the 3DS over the DSi to an increase from capacity from 256MB to 2GB. The memory modules are supplied by Samsung and are embedded as a multimedia card.

The three cameras Nintendo uses for 3D photography costs $4.70 and that's just 20 cents more expensive than the camera on the DSi.

While Nintendo has to deal with an increased BOM cost with the 3DS when compared to the older DSi, given that Nintendo is able to flog the device at around three times the manufacturing cost, clawing back the research and development cost shouldn't be too hard. µ