It's been asked before but it's been six years and I see it coming up more since Combiner Wars ran it's course. Do you prefer light piping or painted eyes?

Personally I used to like light piping but as I've aged I've grown to hate it. I can understand the play value but as an adult collector, most of my figures spend their time posed on my shelves and unless you've got back-lit shelves, all those figures with lightpiping just look black, where as painted eyes can still pop very well.

 

Call me a kid, but Ive always loved light piping.

It's one of the simplest but coolest gimmicks in the TF line.

 

I prefer painted. Piping is nice but you rarely see it.

 

Painted. I find light piping to be quite ugly.

 

I much prefer painted eyes.

Light piping also ruins the bot's heads for me because of the half colored half translucent heads.

I love how the CW/UW lines were mostly painted eyes and will never understand the decision to make Groove's and Afterburner's eyes translucent.

 

i prefer lightpiping as a whole, but there are a few figures that would suffer from it.....what confuses me is when there are lightpiped figures with painted eyes, like gen. roadbuster....

 

I feel that light piping is a fairly definitive aspect of TFs. Not many other lines did it except for Bionicle.

 

As a kid I preferred painted eyes, but as a collector I prefer light piping.

 

Or generations Nightbeat. The Go Shooter repaint has light piping that works.

 

Light piping is fine with me because that usually means a two or multi-part head that you can unscrew and take apart. If you don't like the light piping it's easy to paint over just the eyes portion.

 

As I take pictures of my figures outside, I prefer light piping. It just adds something special when I look back at a picture later on.

 

I hate pipe lighting with a passion.

 

I agree completely. Piping is nice when it works well, but unless you have a setup as you described they end up looking like they have dead eyes.

 

I like them but I don't have a preference one way or the other, at least for CHUG figures. I do have a lighted display but its full of MP figures, which should never be lightpiped imo.

 

i love light piping and really missed it in Combiner Wars, add's a lot of personality.

 

I like light piping...but if done incorrectly, it can cause "dead eye syndrome". In other words, it's great if you're using vibrant colors. But darker reds, purples and blues just give the bots a dead look to them.

 

I hate them. It's cool when the light hits at the right angle but otherwise you've got dark eyes and a stupid colored had. Generations Arcee is a particularly egregious example: half of her white head is deep blue.

 

Used to hate it, got use to it now and I think it can depend from figure to figure. It tends to look "worse" if it's on a figure without great natural lighting - they can be very dead-eyed under those sorts of conditions.

 

Painted eyes. They just look better, especially since I don't have a lot of fancy lighting with my displays.