At one time Japanese cameras came with a little sticker, "JCII Passed", from the Japan Camera Inspection Institute. Sometime in the 1980's they started to show up with stickers that said "Passed" or "QC Passed", which meant nothing.
Pretty soon it spread to all sorts of consumer items, including electronics.
That's when I got the feeling that quality control had been forgoten about. What really clinched it for me was when I saw for the first time a Tiawanese knock-off of a Japanese knock-off of US product.
Now you can get PRC made knock-offs of Korean knock-offs of Tiwanese knock-offs of Japanese knock-offs of US products legally sold under the original brand name. :-(
Geoff.
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Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm@mendelson.com N3OWJ/4X1GM
30 years ago, market was growing all over the world. Now things are different: in our countries (1st world...) people MOSTLY CHANGE their apparatus when them are broken. So..... Slang
Heat and having too high a voltage across the capacitors is what will reduce their lifespan. In a properly designed device the electrolytic capacitors can last for dozens of years. It is the question of the quality choice of the capacitors, and the design of the device that they are to be used in.
There are many devices used in industry and high end consumer products where the capacitors will last more than the life usage of the product.
Heat and having too high a voltage across the capacitors is what will reduce their lifespan. In a properly designed device the electrolytic capacitors can last for dozens of years. It is the question of the quality choice of the capacitors, and the design of the device that they are to be used in.
There are many devices used in industry and high end consumer products where the capacitors will last more than the life usage of the product.
Jerry G.
Whilst design, incident and internal heat, and applied voltage undoubtedly influence the lifespan of electrolytics, I'm not sure that I would agree that 'industrial' or 'high end' as descriptions of equipment, can be taken as any kind of reliable pointers as to the liklihood of any caps which they use, being long-lived. Many high end amplifiers that pass across my bench, are the worst constructed (and designed) pieces of junk that you could imagine, and frankly, I think that the companies producing them should be prosecuted for robbery. Bad caps are often the cause of the equipment's failure. By the same token, some of the cheapest 'made for the masses' items, absoluely amaze me as to their design quality and construction standards when I get inside them. As for industrial electronics, the range of qualities encountered is staggering, and again, even on boards costing many hundreds of pounds, bad caps are frequently encountered ...
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