4-band Resistor Colour Code
The coloured bands are shown as: YELLOW , VIOLET, ORANGE and GOLD. Then the resistance using the colour wheel is found as:
As this is a 4-band resistor and the resistor colour code wheel can be used to find the resistive values of 5-band resistors, then the 3rd digit wheel is not used in this case. Then the colour code wheel shows:
The first colour band (yellow) gives the first digit value of 4. The second colour band (violet) gives the second digit value of 7. This gives a two digit value of 47. Multiply this by the value of the third band. In this case, orangewhich has a value of 1000 or 1k, so the resistor has a resistive value of 47,000 ohms (47 × 1000 = 47000) or 47kΩ’s. The last band gives the resistors tolerance value and gold equals a tolerance range of ±5%.
Then using the resistor colour wheel, the resistor has the following resistance:
Yellow Violet Orange = 4 7 3 = 4 7 x 103 = 47000Ω or 47kΩ ±5%.
In this second example, we will use it to find the value of the following 5-band resistor. Five band colour codes are used to provide more precise values in precision metal-film resistors with lower tolerances.
| Colour | Digit | Multiplier | Tolerance |
| Black | 0 | 1 | |
| Brown | 1 | 10 | ± 1% |
| Red | 2 | 100 | ± 2% |
| Orange | 3 | 1,000 | |
| Yellow | 4 | 10,000 | |
| Green | 5 | 100,000 | ± 0.5% |
| Blue | 6 | 1,000,000 | ± 0.25% |
| Violet | 7 | 10,000,000 | ± 0.1% |
| Grey | 8 | ± 0.05% | |
| White | 9 | ||
| Gold | 0.1 | ± 5% | |
| Silver | 0.01 | ± 10% | |
| None | ± 20% |
