Lego's false advertising with Minifigure prints

[Takanuinuva]

This is mainly talking about when they print skin tones onto dark plastic. The actual prints are poor and dull. But the CG art is flawless.

Referring to figures like Lady Iron Dragon, Mercy and the recent Endgame Captain America.

Either make the actual prints better. Or make the art look like the IRL piece with the faded print.

Lego can't keep lying to us about this.

Edited April 4, 2019 by Takanuinuva

[Aanchir]

Making CGI art look like the real piece would only make sense if the print were faded by design. After all, the CGI art is usually just the original graphic created for printing applied as a skin/texture to a 3D model. Unlike in real life, it doesn't have an issue with distorted colors depending on what color part it's applied to. So to create art that did have faded patterns would require having two different versions of each graphic: one for printing (distorted by the color of the underlying plastic) and one for CGI (with the distortion applied digitally to the graphic before applying it).

In general, I think if enough people continue to contact LEGO Customer Service about this issue then LEGO will find a way to resolve it. After all, they invest a lot of money in their customer service department, and that money effectively goes to waste if they're not logging and making efforts to resolve customer complaints. A lot of people are probably quick to assume that when they find an issue that's known in the LEGO fan community, LEGO already knows about it. To some extent, maybe they do. But those complaints aren't often documented in a way that makes it any easier for LEGO to solve than it was for them to prevent it in the first place.

For example, consider the issues with Reddish Brown parts being fragile — we all know it affects that color more than any others, and that it doesn't seem to be specific to any one part category or shape (unlike, say, the fragile Bright Yellowish Green Bionicle joints from 2007 — other Lime Green parts that year did not demonstrate any issues on that scale). But the issue with Reddish Brown seems to affect some people's parts a whole lot more than others (I've almost never experienced it, but I'd be a fool to think that makes it uncommon or unimportant), and there's no way for us as fans to tell whether that's just random chance, or whether it's an issue particular to dyes from a certain supplier, or to oversights manufacturing processes at a certain factory, or something else entirely.

However, if LEGO gets enough customer service complaints, they can cross reference them with the records from their production line and figure out not only where and when the problem originated and how widespread it is, but what changes need to be made to keep it from happening again.

In this case, we've seen that there ARE variations in when it does or doesn't occur — for example, the Lady Iron Dragon minifigure from the Ninjago Movie sets had a translucent face print that showed the black plastic underneath, while the Lady Iron Dragon minifigure from the keychain had much higher quality printing. So that makes me suspect that this is an issue with printing machines at particular factories, or possibly with the supplier they're getting their ink from.

Edited April 4, 2019 by Aanchir

[Johnny1360]

I can honestly say, I have never noticed but that is only because I don't really view LEGO advertising or really pay much attention to the box art. I do agree with the lousy skin tone over dark colors thing though and if it is like you say, it definitely seems wrong for them to do that, to me anyway. It should look like the pictures for sure, if it is advertising for a set or specific figure. 

[MAB]

It is not just skin, it happens on many light on dark prints. For example, take this Luke Skywalker:

 

The print of his robes on his legs is dreadful. It is not dense enough so appears cream rather than white giving an abrupt colour change from the top to the bottom of what is meant to be the same piece of material. The print also doesn't extend to the edges of the part, so there are tan lines showing through. They'd need to do a second pass of white to get the colour density up but presumably this costs them a colour slot on the print run.

[anothergol]

Maybe it's naive & maybe misalignment problems would make it worse, but why couldn't it be improved with a second coating?

[Mylenium]

19 hours ago, Aanchir said:

Unlike in real life, it doesn't have an issue with distorted colors depending on what color part it's applied to.

Of course CG textures can be influenced by their layering, how shaders evaluate, the lighting situation and so on. The same texture applied to different shading models will sometimes look completely different. A Blinn shader works different from a Phong and this is again different from contemporary physically based BDRSF shaders. In fact often the reverse is true - you have to work hard to make the textures look clean and without a color tinge. That said, LEGO's CG is simply shoddy as quite general are their image manipulations. This stuff makes me cringe every time and it eludes me how they can get it so wrong so many times, including inconsitent rendering of their standardized colors even without textures. They seriously need to step up their game in this department.

Mylenium

1 hour ago, anothergol said:

couldn't it be improved with a second coating?

Yes/ No/ Perhaps. Printing multiple layers may exhaust tolerances for layer thicknesses and have other ill effects like the colors on top of e.g. a white underprint becoming even less crisp due to ink creep or the coat becoming brittle and cracking in the long term. Printing is a complex physical process. That said, I think LEGO have some serious issues with their prints lately. The white prints not being fully opaque are a particular nuisance, but there's also more general issues with overall sharpness/ crispness and alignment. Squinty eyes on minifigures are unfortunately not uncommon these days. To me it seems, though, as though these issues are particulalrly prevalent only with pieces coming from certain factories, so it's most likely a thing of tweaking settings and training the machine operators better.

Mylenium

[TeriXeri]

I noticed the same thing on the yellow printing on a dark blue torso on one of the figures in the Arctic Starter Set. (2018)

It's much less yellow colored then the actual yellowish-orange it's supposed to be (1 of his arms).

Maybe not as bad as Mercy or Captain America of 2019 but still a similar case.

Meanwhile my Rex figure torso/helmet print from the Dream House set  (Lime Green on Dark Blue) is much closer to the actual Lime color. 

Some of my Nexo Knight prints are also really bright and well done as well (black scurrier/moltor), and that's using yellow+orange prints on black.

Overall I can understand variation in opacity, line thickness, alignment and sharpness and have seen some.

 

See Jangbricks review to see the same color difference and he even mentions it around 4:15. (Can even just see it in the thumbnail without pressing play, it's the figure on the left)

You can also see the white print on the arctic logo has a bit of an orange see-through as well.

 

Edited April 5, 2019 by TeriXeri

[Exetrius]

From that thumbnail you can also see that the sloped 2x2 tile has pale printing as well, and that certainly isn't the only non-minifig printed element with bad printing. I love prints and there are cool designs released all the time, but it it already looks faded from the start, then why should I bother getting them for aesthetic value? Only the best is good enough? ... Not so much.  

[TeriXeri]

4 minutes ago, Exetrius said:

From that thumbnail you can also see that the sloped 2x2 tile has pale printing as well, and that certainly isn't the only non-minifig printed element with bad printing. I love prints and there are cool designs released all the time, but it it already looks faded from the start, then why should I bother getting them for aesthetic value? Only the best is good enough? ... Not so much.  

Yeah I added that to the post, it's also a bit of orange/white on my set, maybe not as much as the video but still there.

Edited April 5, 2019 by TeriXeri

[Lyichir]

7 hours ago, anothergol said:

Maybe it's naive & maybe misalignment problems would make it worse, but why couldn't it be improved with a second coating?

This doesn't necessarily apply to all cases, but in some cases, it's a technological limit. I recall hearing on the Inside Tour that Lego's printing equipment for parts can apply up to six coats of color to a given part, including rotations to print different surfaces. For a part printed on a single surface, that number is usually plenty, but for, say, a minifigure head with both front and back prints for a reversible expression, the number of ink applications that can be used is essentially halved. Increasing the number of times a part can be printed using the same equipment would require a major infrastructure investment to upgrade their production line.

That could be why in the case of Lady Iron Dragon, the keychain version has a better face print. With the headgear screwed on, it might not have a double-sided head like the one in regular sets, which could potentially have allowed for either a second coat of yellow or an undercoat of white on the face print.

Edited April 5, 2019 by Lyichir

[Johnny1360]

What bothers me more than the colors being different, from artwork to actual figure, is how they show the minifigures with their heads and hips tilting and their knees bending, able to achieve poses that in reality are impossible. To me that is much more misleading than the colors being off. 

[Lyichir]

12 hours ago, Johnny1360 said:

What bothers me more than the colors being different, from artwork to actual figure, is how they show the minifigures with their heads and hips tilting and their knees bending, able to achieve poses that in reality are impossible. To me that is much more misleading than the colors being off. 

To be honest I've never encountered someone who was misled by that. Maybe it's just growing up with Lego video games that frequently bent those sorts of rules for the sake of animating the characters, but it's always been clear to me when an illustration like that is just meant to display the character more dynamically as opposed to actually advertising some sort of hyperspecialized bent arm or leg pieces.

[Robert8]

I think this is an issue LEGO needs to acknowledge

At least with Captain America and Mercy they are following the design of the character but Lady Iron Dragon is the worst offender because they designed the character in that way - for a movie no less - knowing that they cant pull it off in the physical minifigure 

In that regard they should do one of these 

1. Stop designing minifigures in that fashion

2. Present the cgi of the minifigure with faded faces prints, closer to the real minifigure

3. Invest in new face printing technology so they can fix it

.................

Here is another one. Sally from the Disney S2 appears to have either inner leg printing or molded "feet", but the real one doesn't have it. So you are not getting what you were shown in the promotional pics

13 hours ago, Avoidberg said:

Not sure if it's been brought up yet (I didn't see anything, but could have missed it), but looks like we may not actually be getting that inner leg printing after all...

Edited April 6, 2019 by Robert8

[Mylenium]

On 4/6/2019 at 7:13 PM, Robert8 said:

2. Present the cgi of the minifigure with faded faces prints, closer to the real minifigure

Won't happen for a million reasons...

Mylenium

[EABricks05]

Yeah I can agree with it looking different from the box art or instruction manuals, and I have had a couple of incidents where I bought a fig thinking it looked cool on the box art and instruction art and I end up being disappointed by how it's slightly different.

[MAB]

On 4/5/2019 at 8:45 PM, Lyichir said:

This doesn't necessarily apply to all cases, but in some cases, it's a technological limit. I recall hearing on the Inside Tour that Lego's printing equipment for parts can apply up to six coats of color to a given part, including rotations to print different surfaces. For a part printed on a single surface, that number is usually plenty, but for, say, a minifigure head with both front and back prints for a reversible expression, the number of ink applications that can be used is essentially halved.

2

Then just do single sided heads. Often the alternative expression doesn't add much anyway, and means the head cannot be used with some headgear.

And if you look at the Sally a few posts above, the head has dual-sided printing in what appears to be a grey, black, red and white.

 

[Mylenium]

On 4/5/2019 at 9:45 PM, Lyichir said:

Increasing the number of times a part can be printed using the same equipment would require a major infrastructure investment to upgrade their production line.

Yeah, sure, then why not do it? It's not like LEGO, despite not having the m ost successful years in recent memory, would go broke by shelling out 20 million for a new production line that can print 12 or more layers in at least one of their factories. This seems like a super lame excuse. Sorry for the late comment, just picked this up in @MAB's post.

Mylenium

4 hours ago, MAB said:

Then just do single sided heads. Often the alternative expression doesn't add much anyway, and means the head cannot be used with some headgear.

Agree. Often the alternate faces seem superfluous, anyway. On some figures the heads fit so tightly, I have a hard time imagining kids even being able to rotate the part/ remove it and plug it on in reverse just for play.

Mylenium

[Lyichir]

6 hours ago, Mylenium said:

Yeah, sure, then why not do it? It's not like LEGO, despite not having the m ost successful years in recent memory, would go broke by shelling out 20 million for a new production line that can print 12 or more layers in at least one of their factories. This seems like a super lame excuse. Sorry for the late comment, just picked this up in @MAB's post.

Mylenium

This is from several years ago, so for all I know one or more of their factories may have some added capabilities by now. At the same time, there's a pretty clear reason why they might opt not to rush to upgrade—not only would it be expensive (not just in terms of the initial cost for the equipment, but for the time it would add to the process for each individual part going through that production line), but each additional print application stage added to the production line would bring diminishing returns, since most printed parts don't need that many extra print applications in the first place (so for the most part the benefit would only affect dark-colored parts with multicolored prints on multiple sides, a small percentage of the number of printed parts produced overall.)

And especially with Lego's year-on-year growth becoming less reliable in recent years, I would say that dropping that kind of money on an upgrade that would only benefit a small number of parts is not as easy as you make it sound, especially when you consider that other areas might be higher priorities for investment with a greater overall impact.

[Mylenium]

12 hours ago, Lyichir said:

I would say that dropping that kind of money on an upgrade that would only benefit a small number of parts is not as easy as you make it sound

I have to disagree. You see, to me this is the old argument about new parts, new molds, new whatever where people don't seem to understand that it's an organic process of rejuvenating your production means continually. So let's for sake of argument say that the production line you may have seen several years ago doesn't even exist in the form and shape it was back when you visited factory X. It could long have been replaced, its components been refurbished and integrated in another production line, the machines switched out for a better product from a different vendor and so on. So LEGO (or for that matter any other industrial manufacturer) are already shelling out a certain amount to keep the trains running, as it were. Therefore expanding such a production line would in my view not be as much as an effort. Sure, they need to make space to put the machines into, change the synchronization of the production line and a million other things, but it likely could be done even as part of a regualr maintenance cycle with a bit of extra preparation. the other part is of course true and you get no arguments on that to some degree - of course the cost and effort will eventually outweigh any gains in quality, versatility and flexibility. That's why more or less was only speaking of "they could do it in one factory" just in case this need arises and to me it appears that at least for some stuff we are not that far away from such a situation. While there are currently terrible quality issues e.g. with minifigs, the prints have become more and more complex and we could soon be seeing parts that have 7 or 8 layers of paint/ ink, exceeding the currently possible maximum of 6. It doesn't take much to take this line of thinking even further, though I guess then you'd have to seriously consider other things even more for technical reasons. Either way, the current situation with the poor print quality is simply unacceptable and LEGO need to do something about it, regardless of what methods and actions they chose to mitigate the problems.

Mylenium

[MAB]

They can already do 8 colours on heads (including orientations) - see Sally above.

 

Unfortunately, they have fallen behind cloners / fakers in terms of printing. A number of the Chinese cloners assemble the torso and legs then print, which means that the print is consistent across the whole figure. There are no unsightly breaks in the print by the waist of the torso where it joins the legs. There are no discontinuities where the alignment wasn't quite right and the legs print is shifted slightly compared to the torso. I guess the problem for AFOLS wanting quality is that for most kids, this type of thing is not that big a deal so there is no reason for LEGO to care about improving it.