Quality of Online Building Instructions

[merman]

To save space on my small table I decided to build Technic set 42009 from my iPad.

The quality of the online instructions is very poor. I know this has been brought up many times, but this time I could hardly keep several black parts (black beams and pins) apart.

Could the embassadors please discuss this with TLG? It will get even worse when old sets are no longer available for purchase. If an instruction booktlet gets missing it will become very difficult to build from digital instructions...

[The Awesomnator]

I believe that Lego will improve them soon enough.

[Lego Otaku]

Try reading Emerald Night instruction from LEGO. Dark brown and black were next to impossible to tell apart.

[merman]

Strangely enough the instructions of the new Technic Cargo Plane 42025 are extremely sharp...

[Legogal]

As you age, your vision up close tends to worsen. This requires extremely good lighting to do anything with LEGO.

The problem with telling colors apart becomes much more difficult both with real bricks and especially with instructions. This contributes to our making umpteen errors every time we build something from an instruction booklet. So then we have to go back with the parts that are left over, take the thing apart, and try a different color to see if it all works out. So I rarely call LEGO for missing parts because usually they were put in the wrong place. I also learned not to throw away the parts bags until after the set is built because so often there are a few parts that amazingly jumped in the trash as we emptied the bags.

LEGO definitely will have to improve the color differences in the instructions for the blacks, grays, browns, and all translucent parts because those are already the most difficult for us to see. Will be interesting to see how they do it, but it is well past the time for this to happen.

[aurly]

They look fine to me, built 42009 B model using a crappy Android tablet. Maybe it's a screen brightness setting issue? Or a low resolution screen? Some systems have terrible pdf viewers.

[TheLegoDr]

I tend to use bricks.argz.com. Crystal clear compared to the pdf files lego has.

Screen brightness definitely makes a big difference! I tend to keep my kindle low to save battery life, but you can't see anything like that.

To add to Legogal, they call it presbyopia. I tell all my patients to find the right working distance and the most overhead light they can stand to see smaller details. As far as looking at screens, you probably need more back light instead of overhead, but it is the same idea.

Edited February 13, 2014 by TheLegoDr

[weavil]

Try reading Emerald Night instruction from LEGO. Dark brown and black were next to impossible to tell apart.

Tried to do one of the Krusty Krab in LDD from the PDF and had could not tell where the next brown piece went after about step 10 or 12 and gave up.

[merman]

I used an iPad4 with retina screen.

[Teo LEGO Technic]

The reason LEGO has yet to address the issue is that a full-resolution online copy would take very long to load, longer than most users are willing to wait.

The best way to solve this is to have both copies available: the fast-loading low quality, and slow-loading high-quality.

[BimmerBoy]

Yep, I've noticed that brown, black, dark grey can get very confusing in some of the online instructions. That said, I'm still thrilled LEGO has these available! They have been very helpful when I try to rebuild old sets I have but no longer have instructions, building a different color version of a set (train locomotives and cars for me), or inspiring design and technique ideas for MOC's.

[weavil]

My daughter's Lego friends have the brown almost as dark as the black.

[TheOrcKing]

I am glad there are free to download digital versions of every set of instructions but the page setup is confusing with many sets having the same 'book' available as two different downloads even though when downloaded, they are exactly the same. My biggest complaint is the resolution and quality of the images being very low, and the colors for the most part seem poorly defined as in appearing too dark or too light, or the wrong shade altogether. Sometimes I can't even make out what a certain piece is on the parts list let alone which color it is supposed to be. Translucent bricks are the worst with black and the different shades of gray not far behind. Some of the blues are difficult to spot just as well.

Edited February 23, 2014 by TheOrcKing

[Blakbird]

The reason LEGO has yet to address the issue is that a full-resolution online copy would take very long to load, longer than most users are willing to wait.

I don't think this is entirely accurate. LEGO instructions are created in 3D CAD software in the first place which is all vector. Rasterizing them is what reduces the quality and also makes the files big. Some of the older models have vector based PDF files for the electronic instructions. They look perfect and the file size is small. There's no technical reason they couldn't still be doing this, so this leads me to believe file size is not the reason for poor quality PDFs.

In my opinion the quality is kept intentionally low to prevent copyright infringement. If they gave us high quality vector files it would be trivially easy for anyone to start printing out their own copies and selling them, or for Chinese clone makers to copy not only the model design but also the entire set of instructions.

[rob-cubed]

^^ Agreed, but with a caveat. Vector art is scalable and (ideally) smaller than raster... so it's usually a better export format for technical diagrams... but the output from CAD is often *very* messy and comes with huge file bloat. Tons of extra points, gradients, and odd bits that end up crashing Adobe PDF Viewer. I think the decision to rasterize is partly a copyright issue but also a practical one. I've had to clean up much simpler renderings that were just atrocious.

[rollermonkey]

I think once they've been converted to .pdf, all the vector / raster stuff is gone. Someone just had a crappy scanner when they were scanning the older instructions.

[Vee]

When I was building, in LDD, set 10182 (CC), the official instruction pdf that I found in the internet was so bad, so difficult to discern some colors, that I ended up taking screenshots of many pages and treating them in Photoshop, so that I could see what was what.