Given Yageo has been devoted to being eco-friendly, we decide to eliminate the marking on the R Chip of the sizes of 0603, 0805 and 1206 as soon as possible. There will be a short period of time that both types of the products, with marking and without marking, co exist while we are changing the production lines one by one.....So... no more resistor values printed on SMD components. For smaller PCB manufacturers who still do a lot of their smaller runs by hand it is going to make life hell, not to mention trying to debug a batch of circuit boards from dodgy Chinese manufacturers. Just to keep things fun, Yaego won't be changing the part number so when you order your parts it will be Russian roulette as to whether the parts have markings or not.
No doubt other manufacturers will follow and jump at the chance to save a fraction of a cent on their manufacturing costs.
Full product change notification here.
