Comment by sandreas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandreas | Hacker News Reader

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LEGO is indeed pretty expensive these times. Not every set is that bad, but the most cars are not only expensive, but not even the best sets on the market...

There is a lot of comparisons, but the most convincing one maybe the LEGO Ferarri (42125) vs. CADA Italian Super Car (C61042W) video[1] of "Held der Steine" (german youtube channel). The LEGO is "parts only" - the CADA is remote controlled with led lights near double the parts of the lego one for the same price.

Many of the newer manufacturers are 100% compatible and provide near double the part count for a similar set. Even if some of them are shameless rip-offs and illegal to have in some countries, most of them are smaller companies with great part quality, prints (no stickers) and innovative designs (see CaDA® C61503W AMG One).

There is also the world of Trains or Tractors, where LEGO tends to fail every time.

There are

  - CaDa
  - BlueBrixx
  - Cobi
  - fischertechnik
  - Unico
  - Mould King
  - burgkidz
  - Wange
  - Sluban
  - Q-Bricks

Just to provide you some alternatives :-)

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXphWMPWsZw

I don't think you can compare LEGO with not-LEGO...

Firstly it feels a little sacrilegious, but religion aside quality is often uncomparable and there was this common meme from my childhood that your parents did not love you if you got knockoff LEGOs. Part of the reason why we buy LEGO is because it's LEGO. Buying some other brand (regardless of quality) does not hit the same way.

But that's a learned behaviour, and one learned specifically thanks to decades of marketing. Sure, LEGO is quality, but it's not some unbeatable gold standard. At some point it simply becomes one of those things where people ask for Coke instead of Pepsi, even if they can't tell them apart - brand loyalty trumping the desire to simply get the product.

That's what I think. And even if the quality of the parts was less good, it's just not worth the LEGO price in many cases.

The video I linked shows the difference.

I think the "LEGO tax" is as much about consistency as marketing inertia. With name-brand LEGO, you know what you're going to get quality-wise. Alternative brands can be unpredictable. I would know; I still have all my LEGO from when I was a kid, and since my family isn't made of money, a lot of them aren't actually LEGO.

Alternative brands can VERY hit-or-miss, and when you miss, you can end up with some truly atrocious pieces. When I was a kid, Mega Bloks was the most common LEGO alternative (in the US, at least), and all of those pieces are terrible. The colors are washed out compared to LEGO, the plates aren't as rigid, and some of the bricks are a mess of scratches and dents.

Consistency is even a problem within individual sets. I also had a couple of LEGO-compatible sets that were made by Hasbro in the mid-2000s, and the part quality is excellent. The pieces have held up really well over the years, and Hasbro's yellow pieces are indistinguishable from LEGO's yellow. Hasbro came correct... except for their wheels, which are the sort of hideous dirt-cheap abomination that even Mega Bloks never stooped to.

Some brands are awful. Some brands are great. Some brands (like Hasbro) somehow managed to put "awful" and "great" inside the very same box. A brand's quality may change wildly over time. Some brands come out with their own extensions to the LEGO "standard," and then never provide a complete system of compatible parts. Sticking to name-brand LEGO offers a much more predictable experience.

> But that's a learned behaviour, and one learned specifically thanks to decades of marketing.

I am not sure this is an accurate assessment. Lego has a reputation because it built that reputation over decades of solid and reliable delivery. Pseudo-Lego brands built a reputation of competing on price while trading off quality and reliability.

The real question is whether the price delta between Lego and pseudo-Lego can justify the quality delta. That's surely subjective up to a point.

> Lego has a reputation because it built that reputation over decades of solid and reliable delivery.

Really? I'm not sure about that. I think LEGO built a reputation, because it was patented until 2008 and competitive products were not even a thing.

Mould King was founded 2012, also more than a decade ago.

> Pseudo-Lego brands built a reputation of competing on price while trading off quality and reliability.

This maybe true for chinese rip-offs, but the more modern approach is innovative, even with licensed models (see CADA MASTER Mercedes-AMG ONE 61503 or Mould King 12025 Orient Express). Features like LED lights, remote controls, remote controlled doors or REAL steam have not been approached by modern LEGO sets.

Where did LEGO have a patent? It certainly wasn't the US. Mega has been here for decades. LEGO tried to sue them under copyright law but lost. My experience with non-LEGO bricks has been extremely mixed, averaging negative.

Show me a lego ripoff that has the same quality and thoughtfulness in parts and we can discuss.

My experience with the 5 brands I tried has been horrendous: parts don't stick together, parts are too small, parts are incorrect.

A local toy store here has one set of shelves filled with Sluban (about ⅓ the size of their Lego offering), and it's just bleak to see. The shop focused their Sluban offering on military hardware for some reason (perhaps because Lego doesn't do any of that), so you end up with drab boxes of greens and browns, in addition to looking just off in terms of accuracy of the parts.

There's also a bunch of the 'fake' stuff on AliExpress, where you can tell the quality of the bricks is crap just by looking at the low-res photos. Getting the fit of bricks right is apparently quite hard to do if you want to offer lower prices than Lego does.

The problem is, that the GOOD part sellers (like CADA) are always put into the same spot as these cheap aliexpress rip-offs...

I think LEGO has done a great marketing job here... never buy something that is not LEGO, it might be bad quality or scam.

You have to choose wisely, but if you've found the good stuff, you probably won't go back.

> I think LEGO has done a great marketing job here... never buy something that is not LEGO, it might be bad quality or scam.

I don't think that was LEGO. I think that was just the off brands being pretty university awful and people caught on.

I'm going through a bucket of loose parts right now, separating the off brands from the LEGO. There are at least 6 different brands in there. The difference is almost always obvious.

And when it's not and the part sneaks its way into my main collection, I can instantly tell when I use it because it either doesn't fit, or fits incorrectly.

That’s a cope. It comes from the same factory. It’s just small mass produced plastic, it’s not exactly complicated.

The Cada cars definitely look good, the Amg one and Alfa Romeo f1 car are licensed too. Has anyone here actually built them? The interiors seem to be all black parts which could be a headache to get the right piece. Technic sets have good instructions and helpfully colored pieces which makes for a great build experience. Just wondering what it is like to actually bulls a Cada set.

If you are not afraid of german content, you can take a look at "Held der Steine" Twitch channel and Youtube Channel... he does build most of his reviewed content.

Just one "Datapoint", but I have a colleague that works in injection molding. Granted, he works on the "other end" of the size scale (complete car underbodys in one part), but he always said it was more or less a given fact that the two companies wo had "dialed in" their molding processes to near perfection and quality were Lego and Games Workshop in the UK.

So, this is something LEGO is desperately trying to preserve: The opinion that LEGO's prices are reasonable due to better quality and more creative design / higher quality engineering.

The quality in all terms is not better at all... they may be CAPABLE of better quality, but they don't provide it just to reduce costs. That's why they provide stickers instead of prints and holed out plastic parts instead of solit ones. It's cheaper in production. If you compare LEGO parts from 20 to 15 years ago and todays parts, you immediately notice the difference.

There ARE indeed manufacturers and brands that deliver bad quality, but if you pick the non-ripoff brands, the quality may even better.

LEGO has always had that rep as the injection molding MVP but I have to say I've been really impressed with bandai. They really dominate the model kit space and I find myself noticing how high quality they feel. I've built a bunch of gundams, Star wars, Pokemon, and one piece kits and they were all super fun. I also like how they kind of inspire me to customize them which I don't feel as much with Lego kits these days (I still love Lego but the kits are so good oob I just leave them as is)

I’ve seen how much attention Lego puts into designing and making their bricks and sets, as well as their general outlook, so combined with their better quality, fake Lego bricks is not something I want polluting or diluting my/my kid’s Lego.

Why are you so sure that the other bricks are of lesser quality?

Empirical evidence. I've tried some fake brick sets, most of them were obviously not as good. The QC is worse for sure, but it's the little things - sometimes it's weight, sometimes it's texture, sometimes it's color that is slightly "off".

Those "other bricks" are quite useful when you want something that Lego won't produce. For example gimp figurine for your Pulp Fiction diorama.

I don't think that LEGO is better. They also have slightly off color, non fitting parts. Especially the "glass" parts are worse than Cada or BlueBrixx, but I'm not trying to convince anyone.

I think that everyone can pick whatever liked. However, the term "fake LEGO" is a bit weird, because the other manufacturers also have well designed parts LEGO does not provide...

Well, simple: we have some

In general, their brick quality isn't on par with Lego. The clutching of Lego bricks is finely weighed and consistent. The colouring is brighter. They don't have nasty toxic smells and paints. The set catalogues are more diverse with many more themes. Set designs are original and matching the age group. There is also historical significance and nostalgia for certain sets and themes, and they can be re-released as new sets with modern building techniques and new parts.

Is this based on your own recent experience? I recently got into the mood to build some LEGO again, after not having done it since childhood, but I recoiled at the prices of current LEGO sets. Got something from BlueBrixx instead and am really happy with it. The bricks look great, feel satisfying to put together and I can't tell a difference from how I remember it from all those years ago.

I definitely remembers seeing some Mega Bloks some 15-20 years ago and they were really really bad like you described but from what I can tell, other competitors have actually caught up to LEGO nowadays.

I don't have any experience with BlueBrixx. It looks like a German brand on the higher end of the price scale. It's not available in my country.

I have some recent limited experience with Chinese knock-offs like Lepin and Panlos, and they are bad in the ways I described.

That's good to know, then I'm gonna avoid those two for now.

They really aren't that far off these days. Certainly no 'nasty toxic smells/paints'. Brick fit/clutching can be a bit sub-par on certain parts, but is generally not far from the real thing.

Lego does a much better job of instruction books than the 'fake Lego' sets I've seen, though. Also, Lego has higher standards for the model designs themselves, whereas some of the 'fake Lego' model designs can be rather more fragile than anything Lego would release, which adds to the impression of poor brick fit/clutching (e.g. the Xingbao Xenomorph)

(Haven't seen any of the Technic clones, though. They're likely to suffer more from loose or poorly-fitting parts)

> Certainly no 'nasty toxic smells/paints'.

There are manufacturers that provide laboratory analysis of their bricks to prove the quality.

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