Its reviews like these that have largely put me off from buying from Amazon unless i'm in a hurry for components although i quite enjoy the anticipation of the wait.

 

Its reviews like these that have largely put me off from buying from Amazon unless i'm in a hurry for components although i quite enjoy the anticipation of the wait.

Reviews are very helpful if the reviewer is trustworthy.

 

I don't know this for a fact, but somehow I just know it's true:
A lot of the parts purchased are from reputable companies who've had a bad run. Parts that are out of spec. Those OOS parts are probably sold off to others who may claim to intend to sort them but rather than putting the effort into the task they just sell them as if they are within specs. And they don't provide any data sheets. LED's! I've bought bunches of them and then had to sort through the useful ones. Amazon is a crap-shoot. You might win, you might lose.

 

I don't know this for a fact, but somehow I just know it's true:
A lot of the parts purchased are from reputable companies who've had a bad run. Parts that are out of spec. Those OOS parts are probably sold off to others who may claim to intend to sort them but rather than putting the effort into the task they just sell them as if they are within specs. And they don't provide any data sheets. LED's! I've bought bunches of them and then had to sort through the useful ones. Amazon is a crap-shoot. You might win, you might lose.

Companies that act this way are NOT reputable companies, they are scammers.

 

I don't know this for a fact, but somehow I just know it's true:
A lot of the parts purchased are from reputable companies who've had a bad run. Parts that are out of spec. Those OOS parts are probably sold off to others who may claim to intend to sort them but rather than putting the effort into the task they just sell them as if they are within specs. And they don't provide any data sheets. LED's! I've bought bunches of them and then had to sort through the useful ones. Amazon is a crap-shoot. You might win, you might lose.

That describes SOME of the parts floating around, but not nearly all of them. There are countries where it's an entire industry to scavenge parts off of boards, often taken from recycling centers or even landfills, sorting them by package style, and then selling them to outfits that remark them with whatever logo and part number they want to sell the part as, without any regard to what the part actually is. In between this are companies that just clean up the parts (in bulk) and then sell them as new. Or they may obtain, possibly as discards, possibly by purchase, similar parts and then resell them as higher grade parts. This is very common when memory devices, like USB and other flash drives, in which they might sell a part as a 512 GB flash drive by in fact it has a 32 GB, or even considerably smaller, die in it and has been tweaked to say that it has 512 GB capacity. But try to go over the true capacity and it either acts like a full drive, or it may become completely corrupted.

The people that engage in these activities do not care about the downstream consequences of their actions once a sucker buys it from them.

 

And then there are countries that take scrap components and scrape the markings off of them and remark them as more expensive similar components and sell them as such... It is one thing to buy surplus inventory left over from a production run being resold in the market by a reputable dealer and used cleaned scrap being resold by someone who is only out to make a profit by unscrupulous means. And then there are those countries who mass produce "generic" components with no quality controls. There are far too many nefarious vendors... Caveat Emptor which means buy only from very reputable dealers.

 

I did have 50 boards assembled in China a few years back. There were two I2C chips on the board.... and unfortunately one of them was fake – it spit out garbage whenever any message was sent.

The reputable assembler had been scammed and received bogus parts. I am sure they did not intent to use bogus parts.

They happily corrected the issue with good parts, but I had to ship the boards back. The quote from DHL was "It will cost more to ship the boards to China than you paid for the whole order." Click.

USPS only charged something like US$50 to ship the boards back.... but tracking ended when they left the country. It was an anxious couple weeks waiting for the box to arrive at the assemblers!

 

Companies that act this way are NOT reputable companies, they are scammers.

What I was trying to say is that I suspect a company that IS a reputable manufacturer. They run off a bunch of 2N2222's and the test lots from the batch sorts out transistors that do not meet the specs. Those out of spec parts may end up being scrapped and destroyed, or some NON-reputable entity may buy up those OOS parts (Out Of Spec) and resell them as being within specs. They may have been subjected to ESD and EOS but still manage to pass test but under strenuous testing they fail. That's why the REPUTABLE company scrapped them and sold them off in the name of making just a buck or two. The NON-reputable entity sells them purely to make a profit regardless of the likelihood of failure. They may have to refund a buck or two here but most of us wouldn't bother to try and return a transistor. It's like the drug companies. They make a dangerous product and make billions of dollars. When the lawsuits come they spend millions, leaving them far far ahead of the profit curve. There are a LOT of people out there who just want to make a buck.

 

A reputable company destroys out of spec components. Not so reputable sell them as scrap without destroying them. That is the difference. Now, even within a batch there is variation which sometimes gets cherry picked to sell those components with the best specs at a premium price and the rest at market value. Or so I've been told... I strongly suspect that some of the components being sold cheaply by certain exporters are from not so reputable manufacturers scrap. And I know that some they sell which are marked with very reputable manufacturers logos are entirely counterfeits of questionable quality that does not meet the actual product specs. I've even encountered components that were marked as FETs that actually were NPNs or that did not work at all. The adage "you get what you pay for" comes to mind.