I was looking at buying some old Transformer generation 1 toys online recently but then saw they had a Masterpiece collection.
image source: flickr Gobi
Looked at a few reviews and I thought wow I want to start collecting. I was going to back in Januray until I kind of needed the money for other things so put that on a backburner.
Anyway what I found out from a lot of the research was quite surprising. I found out that many of these figures had knock off copies, which ofcourse is not a surprise. The surprising part was that hardcore transformer fans who review these toys on Youtube were actually saying a lot of them were actually better than the original!
What's more these copies were dramatically cheaper!!
It's hard to know exactly how they have managed to make them with such quality but there have been rumours that these knock off factories somehow got hold of the molds to each figure like Optimus Prime.
Now not all of them are better quality so it's best to find out reviews on YouTube, but there are some that even improve on the original! I mean I've never known anything like that before!
Anyway the proper manufactures of these toys are Takara, Tomy and Hasbro mainly. The knock off's seem to have similar names like Takasa or something similar.
So it's worth a look on YouTube if you are interested in purchasing some figures, it would save a lot of money but then it's up to you if your ok with the morality of it.