Everyone else has moved on to 0402-sized surface mount LEDs a long time ago. Could this manual process just be because nobody is building the old through-hole LEDs in massive quantities?
You're probably right. However there is a big market for quality through hole LEDs in non-mass produced consumer crap (read industrial electronics and test gear for example) so some of the big guys still produce. However when someone picks out a BOM for a production run from Farnell and there's a 0.05 no brand LED and a 0.25 Kingbright through hole, the no brand wins every time.
(says me who just bought 200 for a small prod run). So that's £10 or £50 out of the budget. Thanks to cheap LED guys, I can take my family out for that extra £40 :)
The company I ised to work for would sometimes buy components from RS. They'd supply them in strips of 10, 50, or 100.
The pick and place machine needed blank strip of about ten components (just for lead-in on the cassete).
Transfering components from one tape to another was really annoying. And one of the bosses just did not understand that the fractions of a penny saved were obliterated by time wasted moving components over.
And until you've had to do something like that you can't really understand the benefit of $60 Swedish tweezers.
Ha ha, try hand placing 01005. Literally specs of black pepper. Must use ceramic tweezers due to residual magnetism in even the highest quality, demagnetized stainless. I was placing them between BGA balls to solve a noise issue.
The lady I have hand building my boards can place 0201 all day. Pretty amazing.
(says me who just bought 200 for a small prod run). So that's £10 or £50 out of the budget. Thanks to cheap LED guys, I can take my family out for that extra £40 :)