Harold said:
Can anyone offer a sensible reason why 1% resistors are typically
blue? Cheaper dye maybe?
Everyone I know complains about reading the muddy colors. They drive
me crazy.
Electronics is usually a bastion of rationality. Who is responsible
for this turd of a policy?
1% resistors are typically (although not always) metal film. And many
metal film resistors are coated in that pale-blue laquer or epoxy that
you hate.
(There are also 1% wirewounds although these tend to have numbers and
not stripes printed on them, and they don't show up in consumer
equipment so often, so I'm going to assume you're not talking about
them.)
I used to believe that the blue coloring was somehow related to
flameproof ratings (and in consumer equipment metal film resistors are
commonly used where flameproof ratings are required by electrical
code) but this is just a guess of mine.
Certainly there are also a lot of metal film resistors with a brown or
even reddish color (I'm thinking of Vishay PR01/PR02/PR03). I much
prefer the pale blue body because none of the color stripes come close
to that color (blue and purple stripes are much darker); I have a much
harder time distinguishing red vs. brown (or red vs. brown vs. black)
on the brown and red-bodied resistors especially in poor lighting.
Doesn't matter much anyways, since almost everything new is surface-
mount with tiny white lettering that I cannot distinguish white from
black with! (To be fair some of the parts are laser-etched, so it's
really just a different reflectance of black... no wonder I can't read
it!)
Tim.