[Lantz] Hitech Miniatures Review

Welcome back to my little shindig. This week I've got a product review on a webstore that, surely by now, everyone has at least heard of. Hitech Miniatures hasn't been around long, but if you take a look around their website you'll see they have it very much together for a newer webstore. To add to their interesting webspace, their models are some pretty inspiring work and anyone who's a fan of the Adeptus Mechanicus has probably drooled over a model or seven. To further my unit completion for my fandex, I ended up ordering the Megatherion model to fill the role of the Textura unit. So let's find out how everything went down in this week's review. More after the jump.

As always, let's look at the webstore first. Obviously the word "Hitech" is pretty fitting; this webstore is shiny. But it's not all flash, things seem pretty well organized. The big banner switching through advertisements for their products is snazzy, and shows the company takes pride in its work adding customer pictures and taglines like they have.

The categories for products are simple enough, though if their product range gets any larger I'd want to see some more defined categories or the option to see more products per page. As it stands right now, however, the product range is small enough that this isn't an annoyance. Each product comes with more than enough pictures to see what you'll be getting, along with measurements to make sure everything's dandy before they ship your plastic out.

And speaking of pictures, picture-viewing is made super easy. As I said, each product has a lot of pictures to accompany it, and while a lot of webstores will make you click, close, click, close, click and close; not Hitech. Simply click one image and you can seamlessly scroll through all of the pictures of that product. Another nifty addition that not every webstore seems to include is a price tracker for your cart as you browse through their product line, which I love:

Products themselves aren't cheap (though what is in this hobby?) However, some of these sculpts are either on-par or above GW's quality judging from the pictures, and pricing isn't far from what GW is charging these days. I mean, have you seen this model? Amazing.

So lets get down to business. I ordered the thing on a weekend, which stunted shipping by a day or two, but it still managed to reach me in a week and some change, which isn't bad for overseas. Shipping cost was a touch high, but again, overseas... The package itself came like so:

And protection consisted of a bubble-wrap envelope protecting a solid cardboard box:

The box itself has a snazzy peak at what's inside. This isn't a huge deal, but I'm a fan of showmanship:

Finally, inside the plastic baggy, that is inside bubblewrap, that's inside a cardboard box, that's inside a protective envelope (this company clearly cares about your models arriving safely) is my plastic crack:

All the pieces were there, and had very little flash to speak of:

The detail on everything is just as the pictures insinuated:

The only issues I saw, aside from the normal molds lines, were a few air bubbles here and there:

I should note that the custom-looking bases that are in their product's pictures are actually included, and are pretty snazzy:

Pros:

Webstore is clean and well thought out
Models are extremely unique and well-designed
Shipping protection is above-par
Very little flash/cleanup needed

Cons:

A few air bubbles

Conclusion:

While I mentioned prices being a tad high, the quality and uniqueness of the models counteracts the price tags in my opinion. There are few webstores out there with this kind of work that you just can't find elsewhere. So will I be ordering from Hitech again? You bet your sweet ass I will. On top of being a great shopping experience, their product line has so many models that can fit into my AdMech fandex with ease. Cantharis anyone?

On a side-note, it just so happens Hitech Miniatures is sponsoring our Conversion Contest this month and I hope everyone will be participating if they get the chance. I also promise you this review wasn't a ploy to pump Hitech up, I actually bought this model back in December when they had a sale and, well... I'm a lazy procrastinator. So there you have it. Happy shopping.

~Lantz

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