Just type in “SMD Sample Book” in your most favorite direct from China store. Plenty of pictures on Ebay / Amazon / Ali /etc. These books have plastic sheets and take strips of cut tape. You can buy them empty or filled with different sort of components down to 0201 size. I just could not resist to have full assortments of E24 in resistors and capacitor (Mwa E6 would have been fine) for around EUR25.
EUR30 gets you an assortment of 1800 transistors. There are differences in the components. Different sellers put different transistors in their books.
The pages I have are all made for 8mm tape. Tape for bigger components such as SOIC8 can still fit if you cut of the part with the holes. There are also pages for wider tape, but I do not have them.
I just bought them, and have not used them yet, so it’s hard to comment on their practicality.
Fantastic; thanks for this - I have had my head too long in AVNet and Digikey distributers and just buy the parts I need but a sample book of resistors/caps comes in very handily.
When I started my component collections, I had bought some complete 5% resistor kits from Digikey; 1/4W axial and then later 0603 chips. But now I use those only as backup. When I know that I need something for a design I purchase the 1% resistor that I want. For some values such as 10K I bought 500 or 1000 at a time. There was a big price advantage and I figured I would never need to buy them again. When I standardize on some values (for pullup resistors for example) my usage can add up. I don’t know about the price per resistor in Europe for these kits, but just now I can get a 2K 0603 thick film Stackpole 1% resistor for (in US $)
Or Stackpole Thin Film:
|10|0.06400|$0.64|
|100|0.02600|$2.60|
|1,000|0.01166|$11.66|
I chose Stackpole because it came up with a lower price at 100 quantity.
A couple of years ago it seemed that Digikey had a price break at 500 and the total for that quantity was only slightly more than the total for 100. I figured that for many values, 500 would be enough so that I would never need to buy them again. If I use a part commonly, it is easy to use 100 over a couple of years.