I had looked into "properly" buying LCDs once, just in case it had been within trivial reach of mine and I could just do what I wanted to do.

The one I was interested in would come in couples of aluminized vacuum sealed bags in a cardboard box, with 2k panels per each bags, laid out on plastic trays and stacked few up. The standard procedure to use these things is to wipe the bag surface to remove contaminants, leave it 24 hours at the factory to equalize temperature to avoid causing condensation, then tear it, and put it through production line before the panels degrade from absorbing too much moisture in the air.

I suppose you can forget about surplus parts or just buy 1/n of 2k parts at n/1 price premium from manufacturers with quote-unquote-nonfunctional parts, should you be contractually required to do so, but the point is, you can't easily produce just 1k of something in excess of 10 or so of prototypes built of no-guarantee spare parts.

Unless the total cost of gutting and reprogramming work exceeds that of fulfilling MOQ amounts of few thousands total(including customer warranty spares, media and storefront demo units, investors thank you specials, lottery prizes and all), it's going to make more sense to just buy and gut existing things, than producing just 1k units.