Through Hole Joint Quality

2/2/2017 12:42:58 PM

There's a battle brewing around here regarding the use of press fit connectors in place of their thru hole counterparts because of supposedly 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.