Press Fit vs. Through Hole Joint Quality

There's a battle brewing around here regarding the use of press fit connectors in place of their thru hole counterparts because of suuposedly better reliability. Is there any validity to this statement? Up until now, we have only been going with press fit connectors on those boards that have no other thru hole components to eliminate the need for wave soldering. Some recent designs however, require SMT, Wave and press fit operations (which we have been opposed to doing) based on this reliability argument. Does anyone have any comments? I sure would appreciate any feedback one way or the other.

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Hello Mark, Here in ECI, because the nature of our products, are using the method of press fit connectors in big numbers and although we have SMT components (around 200 per board) as well as T/H components we still preferred to use press fit because this way we get almost zero defects. We didn�t see any special problems in conductivity or any other, so if your boards allow it my recommendations are to stay with press fit method as long as you can. Regards, Michael | There's a battle brewing around here regarding the use of press fit connectors in place of their thru hole counterparts because of suuposedly better reliability. Is there any validity to this statement? Up until now, we have only been going with press fit connectors on those boards that have no other thru hole components to eliminate the need for wave soldering. Some recent designs however, require SMT, Wave and press fit operations (which we have been opposed to doing) based on this reliability argument. Does anyone have any comments? I sure would appreciate any feedback one way or the other.

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