Hacker News Reader

Comment by sixothree | Hacker News Reader

When I buy components from china it is often the case that the price plus shipping is less than the shipping alone from a US supplier.

View on HN

Components are actually one of the three categories of things I order from China. The other two being cheap trinkets and casual clothes. China-ordered components come from the same factories anyway, trinkets are binary (they either work or don't, not much space for quality difference), and regular clothes are crappy throwaway items regardless of where you buy them.

Anything else I consider too risky. In particular, I never order consumer electronics from China (unless I explicitly go for a particular Chinese brand). The crap quality is not worth the price savings.

I'm the same way with electronic components, though I tend to buy certain often-badly-counterfeited parts (e.g. logic-level MOSFETs, TTL-to-RS-232 converters, etc.) from reputable sellers like Digi-Key since I've run into a lot of issues in the past.

For stuff like resistors, capacitors, some microcontrollers, power supplies, etc., the Chinese sellers are pretty reliable.

It depends what you're ordering. In many cases they very much don't come from the same factories. Panasonic, Rubycon capacitors on eBay are generally fake. From digikey, generally not fake (though I've heard stories of them making their way into the supply-chain there too).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com