TOPIC:

I recently got a new built Kyosho Beetle (Scorpion type), where the body was unpainted and the decal sheet was complete. Not wanting to spoil the original body with the rather difficult (for me at least) masking needed to make it box-art, I bought a repro body from TBG. The body was of quite good quality, even if it was slightly smaller than the original (not much or noticable without a direct comparison).

The body being a repro, I couldn't get myself to apply the original decals, so I ordered a set of repros from ebay (mci_racing), and another set from Marwan in Kuwait. Out of the two repros, Marwans definately had the best print, font and colour accurancy, but what surprised me most was the huge number of spelling mistakes, mostly on Marwans, but also on the mci_racing decals.

In all the pics the originals are on the top or at the left, Marwans in the middle, and mci_racing at the bottom or at the right. The scans doesn't make justice to Marwan, as his decals are scanned through the plastic bag it came with. It's better than it looks....




Marwans big "BEETLE OFF-ROAD RACER" decals were quite similar to the originals, but the ebay ones were slighty smaller, and was quite off, colour wise.




Marwans "Schneider - RACING CAMS" is spelled "AACIS CAMS", while the ebay/mci_racing decals reads "RACING CARS". The latter also have wrong fonts all over.




The original Weber decals says "WEBER CARBURATORI", Marwan has printed "CARBURATOR", while the mci_racing decals says "CARBURETOR".




This decal wasn't featured on the eBay decals and Marwan again messed up by printing "WIN THE CHAMDIONSHIP - MODEL Off Road Rooks World" instead of the correct "WIN THE CHAMPIONSHIP - Model Off-Road Racing World".




On this decal Marwan probably discovered the error, supplying a small extra decal sheet with updated decals correcting the "Raring Jeam" misspelling, as well as updating the fonts and details to look more like the originals. The mci_racing decals just looks horrible.





Marwan managed to make "CENTER LINE RACING WHEELS" into "CENTER LINE RACINC WNEELS", but corrected that on the extra sheet. mci_racing again looks nothing like the original.




"SICUREZZA" transformed into "SCUREZZA" by Marwan, who also changed the small "s" in "sabelt" in to upper case. mci_racing got the "s" right, but just put lines where the rest of the text should be, and dropped the lines surrounding the decal. Again they are way of with the colours.




There are many more misspellings, wrong fonts and way off colour on the rest of the decals, this was just a select few. All in all Marwan got the colours close to the original, but the spelling..... my oh my. The mci_racing decals on the other hand went straight in the garbage.

I'm just thinking... how hard can it be?

Looks like there's no IQ requirements when it comes to making decals. What an idiots.

Thanks for the comparison, Maybe this is how they are getting away with not getting sued. I was going to get some decals from mci, I'm going to reconsider it now

I don't think it's purposely done as many of the mistakes are in the word 'racing'.
That ain't a word anybody would sue over, more so specific graphics (which still seem to be there).
Must be similar to people recklessly throwing their foreign language through Google translate and posting that somewhere.

Those are horrific ... "Raring Jeam" ... but what was the print quality like? The repro decal sheets on eBay UK tend to be spelled correctly, but are awful otherwise

I can only think the spelling on your examples is down to a very poor quality source image & someone who doesn't have a good grasp of English just guessing at what the letters are. The colour/font mismatch on the mci_racing set is down to very lazy "redrawing" IMO.



Dam - yep, I've wondered that, there doesn't seem to have been any enforcement at the garbage end of the market

Jonny wrote:

Those are horrific ... "Raring Jeam" ... but what was the print quality like? The repro decal sheets on eBay UK tend to be spelled correctly, but are awful otherwise

In my opinion Marwans repro decals have good print quality, not quite "screenprintdigital-quality", but certainly good enough to use, even on a shelf queen. I have used his repros before on various Optimas and Mids, and they are very nice. In this case, however, that is out of the question, due to the poor spelling on the decals. The mci_racing repros are worse both print quality wise, and design wise. Could be used on a runner, though.

Jonny wrote:

I can only think the spelling on your examples is down to a very poor quality source image & someone who doesn't have a good grasp of English just guessing at what the letters are. The colour/font mismatch on the mci_racing set is down to very lazy "redrawing" IMO.

I'm thinking the same, so I mailed Marwan a hi-res scan of my original Beetle decals, in case he wants to make another try......

Excellent write up Tommie I'll have to pay close attention to my Re-pro's when I fit them to the TBG Porsche body

I'm wondering if the spelling errors are from OCR incorrectly identifying letters. To me it looks like the process is a scan or more likely artwork is grabbed from the net (there seems to be a lot of loss of detail in some of those repros), then OCR the text to make it more readable. Doesn't seem to be much of an attempt to match fonts though. The maybe some colour adjust if lucky and print. That would make me wonder on the quality of the vinyl used to print the decals on.

I would say to make a proper reproduction with very good accuracy for selling is not worth it for the majority of decals out there. There wouldn't be enough sales to recoup time spent re-making a good copy of the original. I say this from someone who considered doing it and has the skills and equipment to make repros.

So for the sticker seller to make any money, sticker artwork is done as cheaply as possible.

To get good artwork requires redrawing it, and that takes time. As an example, I re-did the artwork for the Audi Quattro, many of the logos I got as vector logos from the net, but still there is at least 1 hours work. My Renault Mk 22 stickers I made took a little longer as I matched the fonts as best I could and then alternated what didn't fit. Then you could to print a couple of test prints to best match the colours.

I received some Hotshot 2 repro decals from the same MCI_Racing today, and those are of much better quality than the Kyosho Beetle repros. Unfortunately I don't have an original decal sheet to compare it to, but as I said; much much better.

Tom