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I mean awesome, especially for you guys running a business. But when they sent one to me, based on a 1-time $15 order, all I thought was what a waste of paper. It immediately went into the recycle bin.
I’ve gotten two Mouser catalogs and I’ve only had one $25 order. If I were to order again, I would find what I’m looking for online, simply because of the sorting tools.
Before the WWW I called DigiKey (and others) to request catalogs, I would spend hours flipping through the DigiKey catalog and many others in my elementary and junior high school years. I don’t think you could get that experience online. Another resource I had when growing up was a set of Sweets Catalogs my father (an architect) had, these things are basically the catalog pages for almost every product or fixture that goes into a building.
I agree that the printed catalogs cannot be beat when you don’t know what you’re looking for, but I’m afraid they’ll be all but gone soon.
I was given a McMaster catalog and bought tens of thousands of dollars worth of their goods. Repeated calls failed to yield a single catalog.
I just got another second hand one from work after it was replaced with a new one.
They don’t come easy. If you get one and you don’t want it, post it on craigslist or somewhere else.
I’ve gotten used to their decent online catalog, but nothing replaces the catalog for learning about the stuff you never knew existed.
I find the catalogs from Digikey, Mouser and Farnell an awful waste of resources since it’s so much more efficient to search online, but have to admit for something like McMaster, paper is still kind of nice just to find stuff you didn’t know you wanted, etc. I’m an embedded guy, not a mechanical engineer, so often seeing something I didn’t even know existed really gets the wheels rolling in my head.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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What do we think of printed catalogs?
I mean awesome, especially for you guys running a business. But when they sent one to me, based on a 1-time $15 order, all I thought was what a waste of paper. It immediately went into the recycle bin.
Comment by hortron — April 30, 2012 @ 1:20 pm
You should check ebay for these catalogs, it’s quite
surprising. Definitely not an item for the recycle bin.
Comment by Jim Narem — April 30, 2012 @ 1:34 pm
I’ve gotten two Mouser catalogs and I’ve only had one $25 order. If I were to order again, I would find what I’m looking for online, simply because of the sorting tools.
Comment by Wehrdo — April 30, 2012 @ 1:48 pm
Printed catalogs cannot be beat when you don’t know the thing you are looking for.
Comment by Ken — April 30, 2012 @ 3:55 pm
Before the WWW I called DigiKey (and others) to request catalogs, I would spend hours flipping through the DigiKey catalog and many others in my elementary and junior high school years. I don’t think you could get that experience online. Another resource I had when growing up was a set of Sweets Catalogs my father (an architect) had, these things are basically the catalog pages for almost every product or fixture that goes into a building.
I agree that the printed catalogs cannot be beat when you don’t know what you’re looking for, but I’m afraid they’ll be all but gone soon.
Comment by jpbot — April 30, 2012 @ 6:25 pm
I was given a McMaster catalog and bought tens of thousands of dollars worth of their goods. Repeated calls failed to yield a single catalog.
I just got another second hand one from work after it was replaced with a new one.
They don’t come easy. If you get one and you don’t want it, post it on craigslist or somewhere else.
I’ve gotten used to their decent online catalog, but nothing replaces the catalog for learning about the stuff you never knew existed.
Comment by scienkoptic — April 30, 2012 @ 8:10 pm
I find the catalogs from Digikey, Mouser and Farnell an awful waste of resources since it’s so much more efficient to search online, but have to admit for something like McMaster, paper is still kind of nice just to find stuff you didn’t know you wanted, etc. I’m an embedded guy, not a mechanical engineer, so often seeing something I didn’t even know existed really gets the wheels rolling in my head.
Comment by Kevin — May 1, 2012 @ 5:25 pm