Worst value ?

[Chuck E]

As a balance to the best value kits, what would you say were the worst ?

Points to consider in this thread would be currently available kits at their stated Recommended Retail Price. ( RRP ) This can include a follow up note on whether the kit is actually the best, or worst of the available kits.

To kick off I'd like to mention model ship kits in general as the scary end of the market by comparison with aircraft and armour. 1/700 scale Type 45 destroyers for almost £45 is a bit silly in the case of the Dragon kit. Dragon usually make up ok though. I've not bought one as I considered the price to be over the top. I'd rather scratchbuild.

On the aircraft front, I've resisted quite a few new releases. The Tamiya Spitfire IX / VIII etc looks very nice, but the price tag is too high and is rising with every new issue. This appears to be their pricing scheme, so we know just how we'll have to handle it. Hobby Boss are bringing out a Vb in the same scale and may bring out the IX and VIII in due course. The stated RRP is around £35. We'll see how it looks in the reviews. I have seen quite a few new issues that need correction parts and this is a bit stiff too.

[PaulBradley]

Frankly, any of the new kits coming out of the Far East. Because of 1. The exchange rate; 2. Some are using old moulds in new boxes; 3. Some have big accuracy issues. No names, no pack drill - you know who they are......

[flakmonkey]

Trumpeter 1/48 Sea Fury; £25 and no better than the ancient Hobbycraft in many respects.

Tamiya 1/48 F-16 Aggressor; A 100% price premium over the -CJ boxing buys you a couple of pods, different wheels and a decal sheet. Admittedly an excellent kit in every respect, but no more so than the -CJ boxing.

Hasegawa 1/48 F/A-18E; £62, or three times the price of the not quite as nice but still very good Revell Superbugs. Which come with weapons. Not that I am wingeing about Hasegawa prices, obviously

[AndrewR]

As usual, this will depend where you are. The Canadian importer of Tamiya kits consistently prices them high, so relatively speaking they are not such good value as they would be in the US.

[m1ks]

It has to be relative to your own feelings and desires of a kit.
Lets say an old ratty rough cast airfix mould, (like the bf109e i'm currently building), if it were only available NOS on ebay or re-release for £30, I'd say, no way, but to someone somewhere it may be the kit that rekindles that particular childhood memory and therefore a bargain?
My personal annoyance and dislike is kits which aren't such great quality, (Matchbox Vincent HRD black shadow), but go for utterly stupid money on ebay and the like which leads to another bugbear, that being people who buy and store 'collectible' kits, They are there to be built, fair enough, add to a stash, but please, not a cupboard where they'll not see the light of day again till resold at auction or on ebay or gotten rid of by some unrealising or ungrateful in law after they've been inherited.
The above kit i mentioned as I spent an age trying to get one to build for a decent price, I ultimately got one of the revell reboxings which are the same but go for less because they're not the 'collectible' matchbox one. The thing is, i'd have rather spent £20 more on a better fitting, sharper cast Tamiya version but there isn't one

[Stamford]

The worst-value kit is the one that doesn't get built, and gets superseded by a better kit. When it comes to poor value, though, this one is hard to beat (ok, it's not the RRP, but )

That does seem a bit steep - I think I´ll wait for the new one

[Chris]

Most kits to me these days are over priced.

[BWP]

Is there room to nominate the Airfix B.P. Defiant yet again? I don't care how cheap it is, in the current state of the moulds it can't be worth spending even pennies to get a new one.

The prices on some Hasegewa kits puzzles me. I don't think we have the same import duty issues here that you guys get slugged with in the U.K., so most of their kit range is reasonably priced, IMO (if perhaps consistently on the expensive end of "reasonable"), and while I daresay there are bad Hasegewa kits, I've never come across one that I'd describe as awful (of course, my experience is relatively limited). And yet, even so, there are kits like this one as compared to this one. That's almost double the price for almost exactly the same plastic, just a different decal set. (And that HLJ price is good -- on the shelves here in Aus, those kits are like A$25 and A$50, respectively.) There are times when one has to stop and ask "what's going on here?".

[BillyJ]

An excellent topic to bring up.
May I take this opportunity to nominate Shanghai Dragon for their steadfast reluctance to become involved in the influencing of the final rrp of their products here in Europe.

May I also point out that the reason that we are paying twice the price of our US counterparts for the same kit is because Dragon kits go through two separate European importers.
The kits cost peanuts to produce, even when new moulds and R&D costs are factored in. China is cheap but their production costs are rising as they do in any emerging economy, but not that much and not yet.
Dragon kits currently enter the UK market from their Austrian importers, so we have a China-EU importer, then a Austrian importer exporting to the UK importer/wholesaler.
This means that there are two slices are added to the cake even before the kits get to your favourite LMS or online retailer.

Dragon would do well to review their current European distribution network. I'm sure that if they were truly aware as to how things presently are, they would realise that they would sell many more kits if they took at least one parasite out of the distribution equation.

Model ships? Why is it that you can currently buy two Trumpeter 1/350 Z25 Zerstorer kits for the price of one Dragon 1/350 Z39 Zerstorer kit? There simply isn't twice the value for money there by anyone's reckoning.

Hasegawa? Don't even go there unless you are fortunate enough that the subject you are interested in comes at a vastly discounted Revell-rebox.
Take the recent Hasegawa 1/350 Gambier Bay Escort Carrier kit - For £120 you get nothing but a basic plastic kit.
To make up for the missing small parts you have to fork-out another £100 for the photo-etch, and to make matters worse, the additonal PE is not a rivet counter's add-on 'luxury' - you simply cannot finish the kit properly without it.

Most Hasegawa kits are sold into their domestic market in Japan. Someone recently described what he called the 'Hasegawa Syndrome;, to explain why Hasegawa seem to survive and thrive, despite hardly ever releasing any new-tool stuff. They sell to collectors, not builders, and every time they re-release a kit with new decals, there are a certain number of these collectors who absolutely must have the kit to keep their collection complete. And the price charged reflects the lack of price/elasticity of demand in this market.

Don't be taken in by the old old excuses of 'oil price' or 'exchange rate' - the principle reason for the absurd price increases we have been seeing during the past 2 years is solely down to the price gouging going on by the various importers/distributors.
Amerang/Pocketbond have become very greedy.

Contrast the asking prices for kits imported by these boys to those asked by Airfix/Revell, who do much of their own distribution, and the answer for the silly RRPs becomes immediately apparent.

[johnsan]

Bruce - I think the pricing difference with the 2 kits you reference, and other Hasegawa decal re-releases, can be explained as an artifact of the Japanese market. Aftermarket decals are not that common in Japan and they are expensive. I regularly visit about 6 hobby shops in Akihabara. Only two stock aftermarket decals to any degree. Of those two, one has only a few sheets. Those Hasegawa decal re-releases so hated by so many western modelers provide more decal choices to the local market. The higher price for many of these releases covers the cost for artwork and printing for limited runs for the decals in these releases. Notice that a great many of these releases are colorful and many are aimed directly to Japanese tastes. I give you for example the 4 decal releases for VAW-115 E2C based out of NAF Atsugi. Then there are all the JASDF special marking F-15 tactical meet issues.

BillyJ - perhaps your collector scenario works outside of Japan. In Japan, these kits do get built or eventually when the buyer realizes a kit will never get built, that kit will end up at Leonardo's, which seems to be an elephant's graveyard for discarded, unwanted kits. I doubt there are many collectors in Japan. Too many other social and cultural factors at play for that.

[Softscience]

Whoever it is that imports Hasegawa kits into the US makes them hard to stomach. True, they have some really nice ones. But a kit moulded in the 1980s, and rereleased for the umpteenth time with new decals, but with the same fit problems and detail omissions should not cost 200 % more than it did the first time out.

I'm looking at you F-15 and F-4

[johnsan]

Kind of weird. You can find the original F-15 in Japanese shops. They sell at the original price. You can also find newer releases with special releases. These sell at much higher prices, usually twice the price. F-4s are only in newer boxings and at the higher prices.

[Saxon]

Hasegawa, many of their 1/72 scale aircraft are in the $40-60 dollar mark here in Oz. Many of these same kits are old moulds as well. A bit of a disapointment for me as I grew up on alot of Hasegawa stuff as that is what my local toy store stocked (as well as Esci and Revell) I didn't discover Airfix and Matchbox until my early teens.

I find Trumpeter to be expensive as well and over engineered, the Wyvern for example has a multi piece fuselage, for a 1/72 small aircraft I think that is a bit over the top.

[Softscience]

Kind of weird. You can find the original F-15 in Japanese shops. They sell at the original price. You can also find newer releases with special releases. These sell at much higher prices, usually twice the price. F-4s are only in newer boxings and at the higher prices.

And I envy you greatly for that. The US price hike is on the part of the importer (not entirely, but mostly). I really wish Hasegawa kits were not as expensive as they are, because they do have some nice models.

[flakmonkey]

The Wyvern kits in 1/72 and 1/48 are complex, and the prop assembly on the 1/72 is definitely over-engineered, but of all the Trumpeter aircraft kits I have had my hands on they're the best of the bunch by a long way and not particularly bad value at UK prices though how much they retail for in Oz I must admit I have no idea. Compared to their Sea Furies they're actually a bit of a snip. That complex prop on the 1/72, incidentally, translates into a fully working contraprop assembly on the 1/48 kit - very clever. Don't tell Merlin, he'll motorize one by tea time.