Professional Documents
Culture Documents
4 and 5 BANDS RESISTOR
4 and 5 BANDS RESISTOR
4 Coloured Bands
The resistance value, tolerance, and wattage rating are generally printed onto the body of
the resistor as numbers or letters when the resistors body is big enough to read the print,
such as large power resistors. But when the resistor is small such as a 1/4 watt carbon or
film type, these specifications must be shown in some other manner as the print would be
too small to read.
So to overcome this, small resistors use coloured painted bands to indicate both their
resistive value and their tolerance with the physical size of the resistor indicating its
wattage rating. These coloured painted bands produce a system of identification generally
known as a Resistors Colour Code.
An international and universally accepted resistor colour code scheme was developed
many years ago as a simple and quick way of identifying a resistors ohmic value no matter
what its size or condition. It consists of a set of individual coloured rings or bands in
spectral order representing each digit of the resistors value.
The resistor colour code markings are always read one band at a time starting from the
left to the right, with the larger width tolerance band oriented to the right side indicating its
tolerance. By matching the colour of the first band with its associated number in the digit
column of the colour chart below the first digit is identified and this represents the first digit
of the resistance value.
Again, by matching the colour of the second band with its associated number in the digit
column of the colour chart we get the second digit of the resistance value and so on. Then
the resistor colour code is read from left to right as illustrated below
The Resistor Colour Code Table
Black 0 1
Brown 1 10 ± 1%
Red 2 100 ± 2%
Orange 3 1,000
Yellow 4 10,000
Grey 8 ± 0.05%
White 9
Gold 0.1 ± 5%
None ± 20%
Then we can summerise the different weighted positions of each coloured band which
makes up the resistors colour code above in the following table:
1st Band 1st Digit 1st Digit 1st Digit 1st Digit
2nd Band 2nd Digit 2nd Digit 2nd Digit 2nd Digit
Temperature
6th Band – – –
Coefficient