 Tech is becoming an expensive hobby. What's a budding enthusiast to do? Shop at the dollar store. I'm gonna tell you what tech stuff is okay to buy at the dollar store and what stuff you definitely wanna get somewhere else. You don't need to go anywhere else for our sponsor though, Storyblocks. Save time and money with Storyblocks. Get studio quality stock video clips for just a fraction of the cost. Check it out today at the link below or at the end of the video. I'm gonna start off with the batteries because I wanna do this live. I've already tested these alkalines over here with my trusty Sega battery killer here. And I've got a set of Home Depot alkalines that are acting as our control. Why am I specifying alkaline so much? Because these batteries, well, their brand name and proudly proclaim super heavy duty power. But they're carbon zinc batteries. Now what are those? They have similar voltages to alkaline but they're a simpler kind of battery that's non rechargeable and has about a third of the energy density. I am looking forward to seeing the Game Gear destroy them. It's a little frustrating. These come in packs of five, but this idiot takes six because Game Gear, that's why. But I will give it a shot. Hey, okay. So I'm gonna leave that there so I can see it while we keep going. I expect that this is not gonna last very long. I bought five pairs of headphones over here. And let's start off with these Electras here. I got them for a buck 25 and they come in this little tube. And these are bad. They sound like absolute ass. They have plastic spurs just coming off of them. And they only come with the one set of ear tips. They have no lows, no mids and no highs. Like basically the whole thing is just a fuzzy mess. They don't even get very loud. They're uncomfortable. They're impossible to get out of that stupid packaging. They're just bad. Like even voice content like YouTube videos sound like they're coming out of a cheap phone speaker. They also don't have left or right indicators on the stems. Let's forget these exist and just move on with our lives. These could not be any more different. The cable on these actually feels like it's made of something quality, even though it's probably not. And they just, they feel like something that's a little more premium, you know? You've got these extra ear tips. You've got a microphone built in. That's pretty cool. They don't make a good seal, but they sound perfectly fine. They may cost three times as much as those. Like those are a buck 25. These are $4. They're just so, so much better. Now reviews do suggest that quality control is a bit hit or miss. And given that you can get legitimately good sounding earbuds from someone like KZ for less than 20 bucks, you're probably safer giving the dollar store earbuds in general a pass, but you could do much worse in a pinch than these Rexes. Like they have a V-shaped audio curve. So they're high on the base. The mids are a little bit down and then the treble is a little bit high. And what that gives them is a sound signature that sounds very fun and normal. I'll roll the rest of the headphones up like so. They're all cheaply made. Big surprise, right? But like they're sharp. I hurt myself adjusting one of them because the adjustment mechanisms are so crunchy and they all sound like they're playing through a pillow. Especially the extra bass one here. Like this one almost literally has like an L-shaped response curve to my ears anyway, with no mids or highs to speak of. And the bass is muddy too. It's a little bit of a I can't, I'm trying to go one step. Trying to, no, all of them are uncomfortable. And only one of them, the Vortex here, has any padding at all and it doesn't help. But yes, they make noise, but they're all terrible. Just don't buy headphones from the dollar store. We paid $4 for each of these and I feel cheated. Next up we have the Tec One Bluetooth speaker. You would think it's going to be blue, but in fact it's green. I don't really hate it. It's got the smallest USB cable in existence, but it's got this little suction cup that's actually quite good. And it's supposed to be water resistant. I don't know how much I would trust that. The buttons are horrible. It's literally just this membrane here stretched across it, but there's tactile switches beneath that. You can actually miss the buttons while pressing the buttons. Like I'm pressing right now, there's nothing being clicked. I need to move over. There's where the button is. It's wonderful. You turn it on, it actually does have a lithium ion battery in it. That's what the USB cable is for. I might need to read the manual. That's in French. But today we are going to solve all of them at once. So that sounds okay, not great, but it sounds perfectly fine for like a voice call maybe, which this seems to be what it's designed for with this little call answer button here. So I don't know if I hate that necessarily. Like you could have this hanging next to your shower, not in your shower. Again, I wouldn't recommend actually having this in water. Let's try some crab ray real quick. Okay. So it's crunchy, but it actually doesn't sound too bad. Like it's got more bass than you'd expect it to have. Sounds like just basically a generic laptop speaker. I certainly don't feel cheated like I feel with these, whatever you'd call these headphones. That was the Windows 3.1 log off sound. Now for tools and supplies. I'll be honest with you right now. I don't expect these to be unusable. Will it last forever? Probably not. They're also not paying a whole lot for them. Like stuff like these parts organizers here. These are pretty cool. I actually had another one here and this is totally fine. You could fit flash drives, you could fit mounting hardware, pretty much whatever you need into this thing. This costs $2.50. This thing here, this costs, what was it? Like $2? This magnetic parts tray. These things go for $3 Canadian at the dollar store. Whereas like you'd spend $10 getting them in from Amazon. I don't see any problem with this kind of thing at all. I found it in the like the tools hardware section, but you can find stuff like this as well in the kitchen section. Now they also had a pack of 60 zip ties for a buck 25. This is something that's technically a worse value per tie than buying in bulk on Amazon. But if you don't need like hundreds of them, you're saving a buck or two. Now these aren't very flexible, but they are made of nylon and they're thick enough to be sturdy and they're about the right size for cable management inside of a PC chassis. This eight piece pack of hook and loop ties, however, not so much. Eight isn't a lot and they're squared off with no anchor. They do have a little pull tab on them, but they're too short for bundling more than a couple of cables together and too fat to do cable management inside a PC. What's worse, you can get a hundred pack of ties that are tapered and have an anchor for less than 10 bucks on Amazon. These are a pass unless you're desperate. I also got this two pack of long neck magnetic screwdrivers for a dollar and they look all right. They feel every bit as cheap as they were, but the Phillips driver's got a nice point to it. It's pretty much ideal for working inside of a computer. It's probably not going to stand up to abuse, but considering how much screwdrivers go for on Amazon, it'll definitely do as a quick and dirty drive. The same can sort of be said for these precision drivers here. They'll do the job. I don't know, the mechanism, it feels gritty when you turn it. It's just got this little nut on the end here. There's all kinds of like burrs from the manufacturing process that are still on here that are going to cut up your fingers and they're not even held in like in any way, shape or form. If you drop this case and it opens up or you already had it open, it's just going to all go everywhere. That being said, it does have a decent variety of bits, so it's not amazing. Then again, if you don't have an iFixit kit, maybe this is what you reach for. This flashlight is an interesting case. On the one hand, it weighs nothing and it's like really creaky plastic. On the other, it actually does put out more light than my phone's flash does. Like visibly, you can focus the beam. Is it worth a dollar and three AAAs? Objectively, I guess so, but I don't think you'd be in too many situations where this much light is enough, but your smartphones isn't. One thing I think is ridiculously useful is this here, six in one pen. It's a pen. It's a stylus. It's a ruler. It's a level and it's even a pocket screwdriver with two slightly magnetic bits. Pen just twists out like that. Stylus on the back there, unscrew the stylus. You've got a screwdriver with two bits, Phillips and flathead, which is actually super handy. Legitimately think this is pretty cool. Like it's even got, yeah, it's got the ruler, it's got the level. It's actually pretty cool. And like for a dollar, it's super awesome. They sell these on Amazon for like a dollar a piece too. So this is actually a decent buy. What else is there in these lovely bags I got from lttstore.com? I'm not supposed to talk too much about these, but they do have these little pockets in them that actually make it really nice for keeping things organized. Two different colors and two different sizes. lttstore.com. I picked up some chargers. Big Clive, I am not, but looking at the guts, it seems pretty similar to a Poundland charger he took a look at a few years ago. I'm not sure that these things have what it takes to drive two USB ports simultaneously though. Like maybe I'm just being a hater. The car adapter should be fine. Like it's a much simpler device, though again, I doubt it could reliably run the two outputs that it claims to have simultaneously. And while I'd normally distrust any kind of power strips or power devices at all from a dollar store, this brand from what I can tell is actually pretty reputable. So as long as you're not loading this up with way more than it can handle, it says it can do 1,875 watts. I don't think you'll have a problem, but it won't do surge protection. All it is, is copper on the inside or brass even I think. Just conductive metal that you're plugging into. And oh, you know what? This looks like a job for the magnetic screw picker upper. That works just fine. It's actually really nice. It's like, okay, it's not really nice, but like that's a nice length for one and it works just fine. It's a little bit gritty in the mechanism. It's not bad for, I think that was actually literally a dollar. Of course, batteries aren't the only thing for powering tech that you can get at the dollar store. They also have USB cables and HDMI cables too. Look at all these. I got this here transparent one. I got this here blue one that lights up and I have this one that's pretty long and has a braided cable. But of course we need to know whether or not these are going to pass the tests that we're going to throw at them. That's why I have the cable tester. Although we don't need the cable tester to see that this one is not going to pass because it has no shielding whatsoever and USB 2.0 requires shielding. Let's make some room here. Oh yeah. Let's try the one that we know won't pass first into the USB type A port and into the micro USB port. Yeah, of course. If we look at the details on this one, no shielding. It's probably going to work, but this one might be prettier actually. It does have that clear motif, but it lights up. So let's see if we can make that happen. No. Also it's like blinking. Fail. No shield. Once again, everything else looks good. Actually the ground wire on this guy here wasn't good either, but that's working correctly in this one. So that's better. Oh well. It looks like it again would probably work, but why chance it? Now this guy looks a lot better. Like it looks like one of those cables that you'd want to carry around. Micro USB in and you had high hopes. So did I actually, but again, it doesn't have the shield and it's failing on all of these in the resistance test, which yeah, this one's not so good. You can even see in this, in the eye here, it is pretty lopsided. So unfortunately the highest quality looking cable out of the entire bunch is the lowest quality cable of the entire bunch. Even this guy is a little bit better in terms of how its test results went. This thing costs $3.50 Canadian, but it says that it's a high speed with ethernet, which means that it's got to be HDMI 1.4 compliant. Five feet, 3D ready. All right. So let's get it out of the package here. At least it looks like it's gold plated, I guess. HDMI high speed with ethernet. That's what this purports to be. Moment of truth. Oh, it failed everything. Okay. So these pins are just not connected. All the shields and the power wires as well. Holy. Oh, ethernet. What happened to you? Oh no. Okay. Maybe, maybe we're pushing it a little bit too hard. Let's go back to like HDMI, like regular speed or something. The lowest standard of HDMI that is just HDMI, just, just HDMI. At least signal integrity looks good this time. That impedance is just way too high. And yeah, signal integrity looks okay. It's probably no surprise that all of the USB and HDMI cables I picked up literally failed when I fired up the total phase tester. And the reason why is none of them are shielded like they're supposed to be. And in the case of the HDMI cable, that lack of shielding basically mangles the signal. It should conform to the spec if it says that it's the spec, but no. Now does that mean it's not going to work? Absolutely not. I mean, it might work fine, but it also might not be. This is why we need LTT labs. Get subscribed because we're going to have more updates on that as we continue to build it out. Okay. A hundred dollars worth of dollar store tech items is obviously a little more than I thought there would be here because we ran out of time on Friday. And now here we are actually a week later because the batteries in the game gear were so bad that they drained me for a week. Okay. Here we go. Let's just talk about the game gear first. Our control, which was the Home Depot batteries lasted a little over six hours, which is more than I expected. And these alkalines actually lasted pretty much exactly the same time. Yeah, that actually is kind of interesting because those are the e-circuit branded like dollar store batteries. As for these name brand Panasonic zinc carbon batteries, they are like an hour and 14 minutes or something like that. While I was waiting for my ride on Friday, it died in my pocket. That should tell you something about the difference between zinc carbon and alkaline batteries. Those batteries are still in there. So there's still a little bit of charge in there, but they're mostly used just like Andy and me. Yeah. What does that leave us with? It's a yes on most of the tools and supplies, the parts organizers, one of the pairs of headphones and the Bluetooth speaker, the alkaline batteries and the USB chargers with asterisks on both of those last ones. In the maybe pile, we've got the flashlight, the precision drivers, the carbon zinc batteries and the hook and loop straps. And in the no pile, we've got literally all the other headphones and all of the USB and HDMI cables. Not that that's a huge surprise to anyone. Do you guys have any dollar store tech that you swear by and want us to check out? Who knows? Maybe I can convince Linus to give me the company card for another shopping spree. I gotta admit, it was actually kind of fun. Just like our sponsor Storyblocks. Thanks to Storyblocks for sponsoring today's video. 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Spoiler, it turns out it's a great mouse for the price. Who knew?