For our graduation project Jankees and I needed 40 infra red led’s. The local electronics shop sells them for €0.30 each, which makes €12.- in total.

Jeroen told us about Deal Extreme, a Hong Kong-based electronics mail order company. Deal Extreme offers a wide range of electronics, varying from radio controlled toys to fake eye-lashes to shock-your-friend-jokes to imitation iPhones. It also offered 20 IR led’s for only $2.93 (that’s… €1.95). So it’s 10 times cheaper than the local shop. The best part: delivery within 7-10 business days and free shipping! We ordered and waited.

7 – 10 business days later, we received a package from Hong Kong. But it had a little surprise: 20 of the alleged IR leds turned out to be blue leds. 10 of the remaining 20 IR leds were broken. So that left us 10 IR leds — and they had monstrous emitting capacities!

I myself ordered some other stuff from that site, just for fun. A laser pointer ($1.91) arrived today and it works fine, though the batteries are already flat. A business card holder ($3.83) is on its way.

Bottomline after reading comments on the site: Deal Extreme is very cheap, but so is the quality of its products.