Why do active shutter glasses cost so much?

Its no differnet than any other manufacturer. The Xbox wireless adapter was/is $100 for a piece of plastic.

A new set of Apple earpieces is $30 for .30 worth of material.

Since you can buy the glasses for $100 a set on ebay you know they have a high profit margin. They have to since TV's have extremely low margin - no different that the PC market. Dell's margin is 3%. they have to make up the difference somewhere.

Before the current 3D craze, professional active stereo shutter glasses were always expensive. CrystalEyes have sold for $800 for quite some time. Other brands eventually were less expensive, but the difference in performance was obvious and not acceptable for professional applications.

The technology wasn't cheap, and there was never a big market so volume of manufacturing scale was never achieved. With mass market acceptance, expect to see prices drop in the next few years.

As for Monster, it's not a surprise they are getting into a market where their marketing machine can reap rewards.

If you need Samsung glasses, you can get brand new pairs of the higher-end rechargeables for about $95 each, sometimes even less, if you're willing to buy 2 at a time or more. If you don't want the rechargeables, then you can get the battery ones for about $85 each, if you're willing to buy 2 or 3 pairs at a time. Even if you just need one pair of glasses, you can get them close to $100 each.

As for the Panasonics, I haven't been able to find any good deals on those. The best deal I could find was $145 each shipped, if you buy 2 of them. Not much of a savings at all.

As for the original topic, obviously these things don't cost this much to make, but they feel like they can get away with charging $150 for them, so they are going to try and get as much for them as possible. It's kinda like new video games costing $59.99 instead of the normal $49.99. They are going to sell them at whatever price they can get away with. Another reason that the prices of the glasses are so high, is because alot of the TV companies are going to have special deals in which they will give a couple of pairs of glasses for "free" along with a TV purchase. If they price their glasses high ($150 or more), then if they throw in 2 free pairs, they can call it a $300 value, etc, etc. I'm guessing by 2012 these glasses will be selling for $49.99 per pair, if not cheaper. Thats assuming that this whole 3D thing really takes off and doesn't crash and burn.

They are available at http://stores.ebay.com/green-sum for the lower end of the prices mentioned. I just bought a pair of the rechargeable type there.