for quite some time now. Good quality, *excellent* service, and plenty of online quote options. I think the prices are quite reasonable, and the shopping cart gives you a nice QTY price breakdown.
. . The college has been using pcbcart for some time now and we find them to be very competitive in price, absolutely EXCELLENT quality, very professional service, and quick delivery.
Jim
-- "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --Aristotle
Their $33/ea 2-layer and $66/ea 4-layer PCB prices -- with no minimum for students -- is great.
They used to let commercial entities order minimum of 3 at the $33 or $66 price, although they upped it to 4 not too long ago. Still, quite inexpensive if you're running a business and would otherwise be paying techs to manually solder up a test board.
You have to shop your individual design around to see what's cost effective for low volume stuff. If you want a dozen copies of a small PCB you'll find it hard to beat BatchPCB (they use goldphoenix). If your PCB gets bigger you'll find their per-sq-in prices are way too high and you'll want to move to places with stock prototype sizes (about the size of your hand). If you go bigger than that you'll want yet a third group. If you need an unusual cutout the balance will shift again...
Personally I've used:
BatchPCB for small stuff (can't beat their sq in pricing for small boards). The quality is very good.
CustomPCB (Malaysia) for their 4x5.5" service, 2-sided with mask. The quality was marginal (plated fiberglass shavings in the holes, 6+mil offset on the holes, iffy etching). The service was good.
Sierra Proto Express for reasonable prices on small quantities of 4-layer boards. Excellent quality.
Used them twice. As you stated, etching was poor (overetched, some tracks O/C!), "silver"-plating wasn't solder-friendly, layer registration was poor. Service was average, and unrepentent. Into the never-again category.
No, $33/ea is for a two-sided board, both sides soldermasked and silkscreened, trace/spacing down to 6mils, holes down to 15mils, up to 60 sq. in.:
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They do get you on shipping -- it's ~$20-$25 for FedEx/UPS 2-day, which is definitely a little "opportunistic" for what's normally a rather small package.
Prices and niceness are far better than the last time i had to go to an outside board house. About 12 years ago board prices killed the project, about 25 years ago the same price for a smaller size limit forced us to use "in-house" services which where slower and not as good.
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