Pilgrim76 wrote:Hi Deathsaurus !
Thanks for the pics ! This is interesting, I said elesewhere that last year I discussed with a TF reseller at the french Manga Expo. He had the same dark MP-5 box as the one you show for your reissue. I told him it was a fake and he laughed saying it was genuine, no doubt about it as he got it from an official source. I was confused and asked him to show me the box.
All I can say is that it was somewhat similar to the one from Lena, yet there was still one difference I noticed : In Lena's, the white line overlaps with the black outline of the canon, while not in the "official" MP-5 that was presentd to me. I couldn't notice anything else obvious as I didn't have my own MP-5 with me to compare (obviously), but the general feel of the box was okay while with Lena something feels off (I think WM8 noticed that also). At the time, I just discarded the idea it could be genuine MP-5, period.
But now that for the second time I see such an official MP-5 (and coming from BBTS, so no doubt that it is genuine), I am ready to believe there was a second run with a different printing (something that seemed impossible a few monthes ago).
Can you post a bigger picture of the upper left corner of the box ? It would be interesting to see the detail I mentionned above. Also, are the pictures on the back of the boxes much crisp and vibrant on the first release or are they the same ?
Thanks a lot Deathsaurus, it helps moving forward.
Pilgrim76 wrote:Thanks a lot
It seems to me that your 2nd MP-5 is the same as the one I was shown at the Manga Expo : the overlap between the white line and the canon's black outline that appear on Lena's MP-5 is not visible on your 2nd run MP-5.
I am talking about this :
[/url]
Is this something you can confirm ?
If yes, that means (1) there are 2 confirmed runs of MP-5 with very significant differences in the box printings (even the text boxes are different), and (2) we still have third different box from Lena.
Starts to be complicated...
fenrir72 wrote:Pilgrim76 wrote:Thanks a lot
It seems to me that your 2nd MP-5 is the same as the one I was shown at the Manga Expo : the overlap between the white line and the canon's black outline that appear on Lena's MP-5 is not visible on your 2nd run MP-5.
I am talking about this :
[/url]
Is this something you can confirm ?
If yes, that means (1) there are 2 confirmed runs of MP-5 with very significant differences in the box printings (even the text boxes are different), and (2) we still have third different box from Lena.
Starts to be complicated...
Not complicated. There were three runs. Officially with the first two you have and the third being the "electrum" version + die cast Reflector. The 4th would be lena's KOs
william-james88 wrote:fenrir72 wrote:Pilgrim76 wrote:Thanks a lot
It seems to me that your 2nd MP-5 is the same as the one I was shown at the Manga Expo : the overlap between the white line and the canon's black outline that appear on Lena's MP-5 is not visible on your 2nd run MP-5.
I am talking about this :
[/url]
Is this something you can confirm ?
If yes, that means (1) there are 2 confirmed runs of MP-5 with very significant differences in the box printings (even the text boxes are different), and (2) we still have third different box from Lena.
Starts to be complicated...
Not complicated. There were three runs. Officially with the first two you have and the third being the "electrum" version + die cast Reflector. The 4th would be lena's KOs
Where are you getting that the one Lena sells is a KO? There seems to be less and less evidence pointing to that. There is so far no evidence whatsoever that Lena sells KOs in general, especially now that we know that we cant even look at the box as solid proof. That is just your speculation. Please say that you are just assuming because you have no facts to back anything up one way or another.
fenrir72 wrote:The circumstances is more than enough to convict if this was a court case ( there is no need for a body to be present to convict for a crime of murder ).
william-james88 wrote:fenrir72 wrote:The circumstances is more than enough to convict if this was a court case ( there is no need for a body to be present to convict for a crime of murder ).
Comparisons like these are utterly ridiculous, and make it hard to take you seriously. Everything for this toy is an assumption and I choose to believe mine is authentic, unless there is solid proof showing otherwise, of which there isnt. Please cool off fenrir72, and leave me alone.
henriquedematos wrote:Hey, thanks for the reply! I just messaged the seller to be sure but that almost certainly is a KO, the low price and the fact that it comes mass stocked from China for virtually no shipping costs is pretty much a dead giveaway - although, I'm not sure if that image is actually from the seller? It looks stretched and low res, like he croppped it from somewhere, and I frankly can't see all the differences in it. Nonetheless, it's becoming increasingly more likely that what I got is a KO, which is a bit of a shame even though the quality of the figure itself is still pretty solid.
So, turns out there are actually four MP5 versions? Two originals, the first KO sold by Luna that has the poorly scanned box and now a fourth KO that actually has improved quality and resolution?
henriquedematos wrote:Hey, thanks for the reply! I just messaged the seller to be sure but that almost certainly is a KO, the low price and the fact that it comes mass stocked from China for virtually no shipping costs is pretty much a dead giveaway - although, I'm not sure if that image is actually from the seller? It looks stretched and low res, like he croppped it from somewhere, and I frankly can't see all the differences in it. Nonetheless, it's becoming increasingly more likely that what I got is a KO, which is a bit of a shame even though the quality of the figure itself is still pretty solid.
So, turns out there are actually four MP5 versions? Two originals, the first KO sold by Luna that has the poorly scanned box and now a fourth KO that actually has improved quality and resolution?
henriquedematos wrote:Well, damn, I have to resurrect this thread because this is really bothering me. I just bought an MP05 in hands from a local buyer who assured me it was genuine, and indeed, the box does seem to pass most of the comparison: the print is not incredibly shoddy, the black outline is nowhere near as heavy, the white border does not interlap over the canon's shadow, there is the gray reflection on the canon, and while he does have the denser black background, some people in this thread are pointing out that also occurs with later versions of the second run (as corroborated by some images found on Google), which means he should be fine. Hell, the box is even fairly worn out, which generally isn't to be expected from a recently made KO.
The strange thing is, although he does pass the differences that were described in this thread, I did notice something in the KO picture that wasn't mentioned here but is surprisingly consistent with the one I got: in just about every other picture of an official MP05 box, the "Masterpiece" text below the Transformers logo on the upper left corner appears to be slightly sticking out of the canon, with the "M" always being outside of it...
... Whereas mine has it entirely inside the canon, much like the KO in the OP.
So, needless to say, I'm not entirely confident about this figure being legitimate. This seems to be the only thing that matches with the KO while everything else is consistent with the original, and yet, it also feels epistemically unlikely that mine just so happens to have a slightly different but nonetheless noticeable text displacement that that has only been seen in a KO before. What's even stranger is, while going through the pictures, I noticed something that neither the original or the currently known KO seem to have: the bottom of the shadow in the canon barrel appears to be cut off by the white outline in both versions (much like the upper one is cut off in the KO), whereas for some reason it actually looks correctly printed on mine. Is this another one of the differences between the official runs?
Unsurprisingly, the figure itself is pretty much perfect and, if it's a KO, then I honestly cannot discern it from an official toy out of the box, which is perhaps to be expected given how good these generally are. I've already messaged the seller asking him when and where he got it, hopefully that will help, but until then I'd like to see what you guys think about this. Anyone else who's recently bought a MISB / MIB MP05 is willing to photograph it for comparison?
Pilgrim76 wrote:To my eyes the white borders and canon's shadow overlaps are much more obvious on my MP-5 (from Lena) than on Deathsaurus' (from BBTS). On mine, the shadow was easily 3 or 4 mm thick, on deathsaurus' it seems to be no more thick than a hairline.
Given these evidences, my interpretation is that Takara, for some reason, had to redo the composition of the box illustrations for the 2nd run, resulting in misplaced text and faded pictures as compared to the first run. If this is true, it makes identifying MP-5 KOs quite difficult on the sole basis of the box, sadly.
One of the reasons why you can't find pictures of MP-5 boxes similar to your and Deathsaurus is maybe because most of them were taken from the first run, when it was a novelty. If needed, this could be easily verified by looking at the post date of the pictures you are looking at (If I am correct, first run is from 2007, second from 2010 or 2011).
Yet, I really dig having access to pictures clearly showing, side by side, a comparison between boxes from 1st & 2nd run (and better, from a legit toy and an alleged KO toy). I am considering purchasing - again - a MP-5, and so far, as most of us, I have no clear basis to discriminate a legit from a fake one (and yes, I already own a MP-36, I am just a completionist ).
I am more and more convinced that many fake MP-5s are sold on ebay by honest sellers, being persudaded that they are legit... because they probably purchased themselves their MP-5 from unreliable sources, with the false certainty that this mold had never been KOed
Pilgrim76 wrote:Hi WilliamJames, nice to see you around.
It seems that we are condemned to have this dscussion over and over again until the end of times
I just want to kindly remind you that some chinese ebay sellers are listing MP-5 KOs. I even had an answer from a suspect ebay seller listing "Takara MP-5" toys confessing that they actually were KOs. All of this has been extensively reported in this thread with (now dead) links as references.
Unless you want to discuss that huge stocks of a long discontinued figure sold as KOs by chinese ebay sellers are actually not KOs, can we agree that MP-5 KOs are out there (I don't talk about the specific case of Lena's MP-5 here) ?
If yes, then you absolutely can't say that toys from fake boxes are the same than the original toy unless someone does a thorough comparison. Until then, this is an overstatement.
william-james88 wrote:I see, I was referring to Lena's MP 5, which has had a few thorough comparisons (allegedly) and came back as identical to a release aquired through a more reputable seller.
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