How to Identify a Ceramic Capacitorⁱ<

one of the most common things I am asked about is "how do I tell what value this capacitor is? What does 104 mean?" 

Well its not as complicated as you may think!

Basically your ceramic, and sometimes other types of capacitor has a code. This code consists of  3 digits lets take the example 104.

The first two digits are the value to be multiplied.

the last digit is the multiplier, number of 0's, in this case 4 zeros. Much the same as with the multiplier value for a resistorⁱ value.

so we have:

10 and 0000 or 100,000

This value seems huge, but its actually in Picofarads. to obtain the value in Nanofarads do the following

100,000 divided by 1000 = 100nF

to get Microfarads do the following 100,000 divided by 1,000,000 (one million) = 0.1uF

I hope this helps!