Issues with white printed on red

[Calanon]

I'm pretty sure this issue has been brought up before, but it doesn't seem to have been fixed. Minifigures with a base colour of red but have white printed on top has consistently ended up pink for the past few years now, and it's the only major quality issue I have with Lego right now. Take for example the recent Snowspeeder set that came out last year:

The white part of Luke's flightsuit looks quite pink, yet in the official images it is stark white:

So either Lego have photoshopped it to be whiter, or they receive more coats of white meaning the ones for sale are left pink to be cheaper. I do hope Lego will fix this at some point.

[Lyichir]

I agree that white printing on red parts can be terrible! In fact, sometimes I can't see the difference between the two colors at all!

(In all seriousness, it can be a problem. Not a huge problem, but enough that it might be worth it for Lego to consider applying a second coat of white on the necessary parts)

[Umbra-Manis]

Well Lego's official images are renders, so they have perfection in their colors. Plastic, however isn't perfect.

[CM4Sci]

Well Lego's official images are renders, so they have perfection in their colors. Plastic, however isn't perfect.

They're not renders.

[Robert8]

It's not white on red, but....

[engineermax]

It is true that the different colors can bleed on the plastic. It would be amazing if LEGO could solve that problem.

[Calanon]

I took a look at earlier minifigs, and white on red seems to have been no-where near as bad as it has been in the past few years. Not perfectly white, but not pink either.

[MAB]

Any light print on a darker colour is pretty awful these days. It happens a lot with printed robes or capes. Dr Wu from Jurassic Park is just plain awful ...

His leg printing is not even close to white. Considering how much of the value figures add to sets, they really ought to get this sorted.

[Aanchir]

Just to chime in, I learned one reason for some instances of this problem while I was on the LEGO Inside Tour. The printing machines LEGO uses for minifigure parts can only print a set number of colors on each surface of a part. So for instance, they can only print six colors on the front of a torso and five colors on the back of a torso.

Getting a clean, pure white color on a non-white piece often requires the white part of the pattern to be printed twice (effectively two coats of ink) — however, this means one fewer color can be printed on the surface in question. The rebel flightsuit in the first post already has six colors on the front: White, Medium Stone Grey, Dark Stone Grey, Black, Bright Blue, and Dark Orange. So printing a second coat of white would require removing one of those six colors.

[MAB]

Just to chime in, I learned one reason for some instances of this problem while I was on the LEGO Inside Tour. The printing machines LEGO uses for minifigure parts can only print a set number of colors on each surface of a part. So for instance, they can only print six colors on the front of a torso and five colors on the back of a torso.

Getting a clean, pure white color on a non-white piece often requires the white part of the pattern to be printed twice (effectively two coats of ink) — however, this means one fewer color can be printed on the surface in question. The rebel flightsuit in the first post already has six colors on the front: White, Medium Stone Grey, Dark Stone Grey, Black, Bright Blue, and Dark Orange. So printing a second coat of white would require removing one of those six colors.

Did they say whether this is a technical restriction or a financial restriction. As in, we cannot do it or we won't do it.

There are many older parts where white / light colours have been printed on dark, and they are much better quality than the thin print they seem to use today. While we get more colours and better designs on a torso these days, the quality has definitely gone downhill when it comes to light on dark.

[Artanis I]

I have castle (and other...) minifigs from 80s through to modern times. Some of the Kingdoms minifigs (2010) were "pink" where they should be white over red, some were double white printed. The Royal Knights (1995) were pink where they should be white over red. It's not a new thing. A bunch of people on this site reported their Kingdoms minifigs to customer service for a replacement with the opinion that they were "faulty".

[Lyichir]

Did they say whether this is a technical restriction or a financial restriction. As in, we cannot do it or we won't do it.

I would assume that it's kind of both? With their current printing machines and production lines, it's very much a technical restriction. Now, presumably Lego could invest to replace all or some of their current fig-printing machinery and production line to allow for the printing of further colors, but I can only imagine that that would be a huge investment that would only make a difference for an extremely small number of figs.

[raminator]

I think it's just too time consuming for them.

If you go to Legoland Germany for example and visit the "factory" there (they actually produce promo bricks), you will see how they print.

Let's say they have there a machine that is able to print 4 colors (simultanously on 4 parts). The first coat is white and is printed at the first pad. The second coat is white again and is printed at the first pad too. The other 3 pads only print one layer per color. While the second white coat is printed all other pads stand still. So in the end you double the production time.

[BlueberryWaffles]

Little thing to add: the 2012 Captain America based on the Avengers movie and the 2014 Cap based on the cartoon both have white printed on their red shields without this pinkish color. But my 2015 Cap based on Avengers 2 has pinkish white stripes on the shield, even though it's the same pattern. Why is this?

[Faefrost]

Did they say whether this is a technical restriction or a financial restriction. As in, we cannot do it or we won't do it.

There are many older parts where white / light colours have been printed on dark, and they are much better quality than the thin print they seem to use today. While we get more colours and better designs on a torso these days, the quality has definitely gone downhill when it comes to light on dark.

Part of it is simply the nature of the types of paints they have to use this day. Painting white or light yellow over bright or dark red is almost always a problem. Particularly if they are using an acrylic based paint or ink, which is environmentally friendly. The older stuff likely used more of a lacquer paint or something that did cover better, but was more toxic in production. Plus they likely used a much different production method.

The "different product method" is something we out here often fail to grasp when we compare modern products to classic. Things like brick colors or paint colors. some always cry that "Quality is dropping because it used to be...", when it isn't a decrease in Quality. It is instead a minor tradeoff that comes from a major technological innovation. The best example of this is brick color. People complain that the color is not as consistent as it once was. This is true, but does not come from a loss of Quality Control. Rather they created a new system where the raw plastic is a neutral color, and the plastic dye is injected as needed on the factory floor. This means that over time color consistency may not be as perfect. But it gives them, and as a result us a much broader color pallet to work with. Old sets would have at most 6 colors. Newer ones can have dozens. It's the same with the printed colors. The new machines let them do some fantastic things. Front, Back, Arms, Legs, etc. 6 color passes, tons of detail, in high volume with the ability to easily change designs almost on the fly. The old mechanisms were likely masks and used a thicker formulation of paint, but could not easily be changed or altered and were nowhere near as fast. Which benefits us more? Greater detail and variety with some loss of white quality when printed on red? Or old style limited designs? At the end of the day innovation often involves trade offs. That does not make the trade offs all that bad.