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Subject: 
Re: Its starting to happen...
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.color
Date: 
Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:00:01 GMT
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In lugnet.color, Chris Phillips wrote:
   Do you suppose the real reason behind the color change was to make the product visually “jump off the shelves” under the crappy lighting in Wal-Mart? This would make more sense than any other rationale I’ve heard so far, except that you usually don’t see the actual bricks until you get home and open the box.

It’s a definite possibility, and the only one that would mesh with the claim that they were bringing the three affected colors more in line with the rest of the color palette (even regular blue and dark-green have a distinct warm undertone and look bad next to dark-bley). The one thing that would really affect this is the in-store display program. TRU would see the most obvious benefit from this, as one of the local TRU stores currently has at least five such displays (one BIONICLE, one Star Wars, one AquaRaiders, one Batman, one Exo-Force, and I want to say that there’s one more whose theme I can’t remember right now). But yeah, the old greys have a distinct yellow tone, even when they’re brand new, when viewed under flourescent lighting. The sad thing is that this change makes them look better only at the point of purchase. The instant that you walk out the store...blue crap. Well, unless you’re masochistic enough to light your entire house with cheap cool-blue flourescent lighting. And you don’t mind the long-term damage that the higher UV levels will produce in all of your ABS parts except the black ones (black being the only UV-stable shade of ABS, due to the fact pure carbon is used for the pigment).

   In LEGO Retail stores, they seem to favor recessed incandescent lighting. This would support the argument that they believed their original colors look worse under fluorescents. (Maybe they should’ve just used black lights and lava lamps!)

Oh, black lights are an entirely different can of worms. If you have access to a flourescent black-light (they work a lot better than the incandescent variety), try looking at different colors with it. Some of the odd things that I’ve found are that red ABS (but not the softer plastic like they use for sabers and short-swords) looks exactly the same under black-light as it does under regular light (the only color that I can really say that about, BTW), there were two different formulas of brown being used in 2001 (they looked 100% identical under any normal lighting, but not under black-light, and that was with Toa parts that had, when I noticed this, only been in production for about one year), lime green looks flourescent but isn’t, the shade of light trans-blue that looks flourescent isn’t...but the one that doesn’t look flourescent is, back when the Bohrok sets were still available there were two faintly different shades of purple Krana brains that could be positively identified under blacklight (the slightly brighter shade was flourescent), a lot of colors that you wouldn’t think would exhibit flourescent tendancies at all would have a dull purple glow under black-light, and as I noted with the red parts, two parts made in the same color but with different plastics will often react very differently from each other. And my color palette is nowhere near even half of what has been officially produced, so I can’t even begin to catalogue how all the various colors react.

Now, as for Lava Lamps, they don’t really give off much light at all, though it is all incandescent, I believe. What little color you could actually make out (particularly if the Lava Lamp in question had colored water), should look pretty good.



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Its starting to happen...
 
(...) Ah, yes. Even Target has those display cases, and they seem to have first appeared around the time of the color change if my memory serves me. (...) Yes, I mentioned this because I have known how surprising fluorescence can be since I was a (...) (18 years ago, 10-Apr-07, to lugnet.color, FTX)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Its starting to happen...
 
(...) Do you suppose the real reason behind the color change was to make the product visually "jump off the shelves" under the crappy lighting in Wal-Mart? This would make more sense than any other rationale I've heard so far, except that you (...) (18 years ago, 10-Apr-07, to lugnet.color, FTX)

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