“I bought these to get a good selection of capacitance values for various projects. Ceramic disc capacitors are generally a bit inaccurate and temperature dependent, but from testing I found many of the actual capacitances in this set are surprisingly far from their printed values, even accounting for the expected tolerance. This appears to be a manufacturing issue rather than a packing one, since the values printed on the components themselves all match the human-friendly values printed on the packets.
I assume these are a mix from multiple manufacturers; some are really quite good (e.g. the 47nF, 22nF, 10nF and 33pF were all within ±15%), while others are systemically low (the 22pF are distributed around 16pF, the 15pF are distributed around 9pF, etc.), some are systemically high at the same temperature (the 4.7nF are distributed around 6.2nF, and the 3.3nF are distributed around 4.1nF), and some just have a very large range of values (e.g. the 100pF are from 50pF to 110pF). I expect these results will vary from batch to batch.
Overall this is a good range of capacitance values, but you can't trust the labels more than ±50% (and in some cases as much as 80%!). In applications where the capacitance value matters, it's necessary to confirm the value for each component individually using a meter before using it. Which is a shame since I don't have an accurate enough meter to measure the lower values.”
