Resistor prices and inflation

[ppppenguin]

Back in the early 1980s, designing broadcast equipment at Michael Cox Electronics, we used Mullard MR25 2% metal film resistors as our standard. I measured a few once, using a good DMM and found very few worse than 0.5%. Within a batch they tended to cluster very tightly round a value that was within the tolerance range. For professional (as against consumer) purposes they were cheap even then. No point in stocking 5% or worse parts.

The main exception to the 2% parts were 0.1% resistors by Holsworthy. Fairly expensive and hence used only where needed. 75R for accurate video terminations and custom values for such things as RGB to YUV matrixing in PAL coders.