Colorful Capacitors

[promy]

Why does capacitors come in so many colors? Specially these bright and bold colors. Does it mean anything? like Tolerance.

How may i find the tolerance of the capacitor? Without datasheet.

[Agent24]

Re: Colorful Capacitors

On aluminium electrolytic capacitors the tolerance is usually printed directly on the sleeve\can or marked by a letter code, not a colour, and the letter is almost always the letter 'M' in brackets, eg: (M). The "M" tolerance code means +/-20% and that is what most aluminium electrolytic capacitors use.

This is different of course to the series code which is usually either a 2 or 3-letter code eg: ZLH, KME, RLS, HD, HE, GF etc, although some Chinese manufacturers also use an apparently standardized (yeah, right!) code that reads like CDxxx such as CD203, or sometimes with a letter at the end as well like CD203H. Again, looking up the datasheets is the best way to find information like series type, ESR etc.

The sleeve colours usually only have significance to indicate series, and this is manufacturer-specific, so unless you have the datasheets it is rather useless information.

I believe it is only the really old plastic film capacitors which have a colour coded tolerance (actually the whole value is colour coded with stripes like a resistor)

[PeteS in CA]

Re: Colorful Capacitors

I've seen both cylindrical and the dipped box-style package film caps with color coding. I've also seen box case axial leaded mica capacitors that used color coded dots for the value.

With lytics, it'sort of mixed. Different manufacturers have corporate colors, and sometimes use certain colors for certain types of series. I noticed an orange Sprague capacitor. Orange was a corporate color for Sprague, and I've seen that color used on Sprague film ("Orange Drop"), ceramic disc, solid tantalum, and some electrolytics.