Seeed Studio vs ITead Studio PCB service head to head
Florin made a head to head comparison of Seeed and ITead’s inexpensive PCB services. He made the orders with the same design files, on the same day. While the Seeed order came in after 4 weeks, ITead’s came just 15 days after the order was made. The author however suspects it might have been a fluke, since all his earlier orders from ITead took around 4 weeks to complete too.
In Florin’s opinion the quality was identical. In the high resolution pictures it appears that the Seeed boards have better silk screen and drill positioning. This is odd because they came from the same PCB fab unaltered! Perhaps a cheaper service, or just general inconsistency between batches or boards?
Read the full comparison on his blog, along with super hi-res pictures of the boards.
This entry was posted in PCBs and tagged comparison, DorkBot, ITead, PCB service, Seeed.
Comments
This really is comparing 2 batches of boards since both seeed and itead send your gerbers to same factory … so this is 2 batches of pcb’s from same factory, one batch was better then the other, it just show how unreliable that factory is, nothing else, next time you do the boards with seeed and itead the situation can be reversed or they can both produce good or bad boards …
Last year I ordered a batch of 50 blue pcbs from Seeed and they had two slightly different blue shades. So apparently they had to refill the hopper (is that the right word for the container holding the paint in the machine?) during my batch. Maybe it was some green residue in the first part of the batch that affected the color.
So even within the same batch there can be color differences – so I’m not surprised to see color differences between two unrelated batches.
+1 to ahri: the fab is the same, different results means low reliability.
About the timing, i’ve always experienced faster processing with ITead, maybe as they are smaller than seeed and with a lower amount of orders.
BTW, I love both of them, they actually changed the way I prototype!
Slightly off topic, but ENIG finish (from OSH) sure is nice to solder onto. SMD parts really love it…
ENIG looks nice and makes things solderable for a long time. But the HASL makes hand soldering a bit quicker since you can usually temporary tack down one side of the parts without adding any solder so you can work with only two hands (instead of requiring three – tweezer, iron and solder) :-)
I too love them both, I have problem with Itead as they require paypal while seeed allow regular ccard payment so I tend to use seeed more often, I get same time on both providers (~4 weeks) just like with any other shipment from PRC. Looks like it takes 4 weeks to get stuff from PRC to Serbia so few days seeed/itead take to make the boards really makes no difference…. It’s not a fast way to prototype stuff so I still have to make pcb’s in bathroom from time to time but yes.. very affordable …
for small pitc ENIG rules !!! thing with HASL and HASL-LeadFree is that they tin the boards using non chemical method, I think they use wave or hot air method to tin the boards so that makes uneven level for the pads as there’s no way they can precisely put same amount of solder on each pad while with ENIG they use chemical process so the amount of gold is perfectly same so when you put your smd component on it fits perfectly :D … I don’t know if they add a layer of nicl underneath the gold or they push gold directly on copper as directly on copper is cheaper but significantly lower quality (there’s some long story about that and I forgot it :D but for long time stuff you should not goldplate copper directly, something forms between gold and copper I think … not an issue for pads as you melt the gold from copper anyhow but it is issue for connectors and test points)