2013 Master Catalog is Out!
(blogger@L-com.com)
Each year L-com produces a Master Catalog, usually with around 260 or so pages of technical information. Yes, it does list hundreds or even thousands of wired and wireless connectivity products, but it is much more than an ordinary catalog as it contains a lot of other helpful things. To start off, the first few pages are a helpful, full-color visual index. Know what you need but not sure what L-com calls it or where they put it? This index helps narrow down where to look! The back of the catalog contains a regular text-based index to get more granular.
Free Technical Info
As soon as you open the catalog, you can tell it's not your grandfather's electrical component catalog. Instead of thin, black and white newsprint pages, the L-com catalog has clean, glossy pages filled with beautiful full-color images. The catalog is broken up into more than twenty product category sections, and each section starts with a helpful tutorial that contains tips, diagrams, frequently asked questions, tables and matrices, and even definitions of common terms.
But the help doesn't end with the tutorials. As you flip through each section, you'll see dozens of helpful tips embedded in the regular listings. These help you get oriented and determine which product meets your needs. They also address common questions that readers often ask when viewing that particular page.
At the end of the catalog, there are two pages dedicated to identifying common connector types and their names. Check out the helpful chart of coaxial connectors, audio/video connectors, and even closeup pictures of D-Subminiatures and Centronics connectors! The catalog is practically a helpful reference book for the connectivity industry.
Then The Products
All of this technical information comes with the catalog, but the main attractions are the listings of hundreds of unique product families. L-com says they have over 22,000 unique SKUs on their website, which is a lot to stuff into just 260 pages of catalog. Yet L-com does it with grace and elegance, listing the most popular product lines and explaining part numbering systems that allow you to get more complex items, like to specify by length, color, or style. Their designers worked very hard to get the maximum number of items while not turning it into a confused jumble. Instead, you have clearly delineated subsections, each with a headline and paragraph of copy explaining what the listed items are. The listings are in table format and include the discounts for larger-quantity orders.
All this Free
The biggest beauty of L-com's catalog is that it is free. Simple. Easy. Just fill out the form on their website and in a number of days it will arrive at your doorstep or desk, ready for use. L-com fulfills catalog requests each week from around the world, shipping at no charge. They can also include a catalog in the box when they ship your order, if you'd like.
Not ready to give up your address to L-com? They also have a free "flip book" style online catalog! This is a Flash-based catalog you can view in your Internet browser without needing to give any information away. If you would rather download parts or all of the catalog so you can view them offline, L-com even makes .pdf versions of their catalog downloadable from their website. And though the entire catalog is fairly large to download (nearly 35 MB), you can also download just the section you are interested in, such as just the fiber optic section, or just the antenna section.
You can even download individual pages. And that means that if you want just a tutorial, for instance, without the listing of products, L-com makes that available to you. This is a company that does not force you to view its product listings in order to get the tutorials, a company that does not charge you for its catalog, and a company that tries its best to help you learn and understand the technology it sells.
Quick note: To get a free catalog shipped to you, fill out this form on L-com's website. Or, you could always contact them with the information needed to send out the catalog, or to ask questions. They mail using the US post office, but they can accommodate requests to mail other ways if you need it.
No comments:
Post a Comment