Good Deal on Resistor Assortment

[magic]

Digi-Key

Now, that's a ridiculous generalization

Go to LCSC, select 1kΩ and 1/4W or more, sort by price.
Metal film starts from $.004 at 10k+ quantities.
Carbon film goes down to $.0015, although mostly out of stock right now.

carbon film actually costing slightly more.

It's the FU fee for bothering them with stuff that most everyone buys elsewhere.

[magic]

And by the way, the kits I linked are $.005 per resistor.

Assuming they are metal film, that's the same price you would pay for such quantity at LCSC. For about one full reel of identical resistors, with no cutting, no mixing, no labeling, no AliExpress fees, and shipping paid separately.

 

[tooki]

Digi-Key

Now, that's a ridiculous generalization

It was a singular example.

[tooki]

Go to LCSC, select 1kΩ and 1/4W or more, sort by price.

Challenge accepted, except that to make it a meaningful comparison between resistor types, as opposed to a meaningless comparison between brands, I also limited it to a single brand (in my example, Uni-Royal). The result? For a full box of 5000, the carbon film are $0.0066, while metal film are $0.0067.

I also looked on Digi-Key for whole boxes of 5000, again doing same-brand comparisons. For Yageo, the cheapest carbon film is CHF 0.00764, while the cheapest metal film is CHF 0.00876.

Ergo: I absolutely stand by my claim that metal film and carbon film cost “essentially the same” these days.

[magic]

Try CCO(Chian Chia Elec), then.

Who cares. Only the cheapest carbon film resistors are cheap enough to make those Chinese "metal film" kits possible, and that's because they are half the price of even the dodgiest metal film resistors that you will find anywhere outside of AliBayZon.