Bob,
Some thoughts on your thoughts. I collect both so consider myself relatively impartial but here's my take on this:
-price for a collector on a meagre or tight budget
Agreed. I'm trying to curtail my additional lines to plastic (eg ZW - castings + plastic, Spartans - plastic (hopefully!) + a few metal), to keep cost down
-easy to cut and re-sculpt (assume RC's new Spartans have been manufactured this way deliberately to help collectors get those unique poses without having to hack the lumps of plastic)
Again agreed, they are a lot more forgiving when slicing and dicing, and if you get it wrong, well, so what, it didn't cost much in the first place
-collectors can build up a significant amount of troops quite swiftly and cheaply.
Yep
-childhood memories of playing in the dirt.
My wife won't let me, so I have to hide them strategically around the house. Then claim my 7 year old did it
-and I believe what you guys have posted here on the forum that Conte's plastics are the very best on the market.
I believe they are, although TSSD are pretty close behind, and Fubs Russians look top notch
However, as far as I'm concerned all the above are insignificant when equated with the downside of plastics
-even with a professional paint finish you can still easily identify the base material-that wafer-thin smooth base stand always gives it away in most cases.
Take a look at Conte's, TSSDs etc latest figures, along with PU and so on. More plastic under those figures than Pammy Anderson can shake a stick at.
-the lack of any weight-I've seen over exuberant kids knock against a collectors dio at a TS show and scatter his plastic troops like a bowling pin strike.
Agreed, they don't have the nice weighty feel of a metal figure, but the plastic is getting denser, and there's a lot more weight than the old Airfix type figures of the 70's
-a lot of plastics I've seen seem to have convex/concave bases making it devishly difficult to get them to stand properly.
Again, another cast back of yesteryear. Very few plastic figures, at least the quality ones, have this problem.
-re-sale value for a whole collection-peanuts or less! I've seen an army of hundreds of plastics go for less than 60 bucks on e-bay.
Can't really disagree here. There are some obvious exceptions, such as Conte's pre-release Spartans, a few of the older rarer sets, and odd bits like Jason Popes own painted PU Spartans (which regularly go for $60 - $70 for 2 figures, mind you, the paint job on them is awesome)
-But by far the worst thing about practically all plastic soldiers that I have seen especially in the new softer material is those bloody droopy- bendy Springfields/Spears/Swords/Pennants/Flags or whatever the figure is carrying in his mitt. I have seen a preponderance amount of this at shows, even in catalogues & magazines and on members dios posted here (yours included) so I am assuming these crooked rifles that look like bows etc cannot be straightened successfully. That alone would drive me absolutely crazy when building and displaying a dio in plastic and therefore makes it metals only for me.
I've not had any figures, however bendy, that the hot / cold treatment didn't work on, irrespective of type of plastic. Obviously, with the softer type of plastic, the plastic still remains soft, but it should bounce back to the right place if knocked (probably take half the paint off mind
)
Hope that wasn't a slaughter
.
Simon
