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Kato - New Releases


Darren Jeffries

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Looks like they are trying to compete with Tomix mini curved track. I wonder if there are turnouts in the works?

 

The stainless steel kiha 35-900 looks interesting, something different.

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hey all jus thought i'd mention the ginza subway is drop in decoder dcc compatable

 

I can't think of any single recent Kato tooling that isn't...

 

Agree clem, but I'm sure I read another thread that claimed ginza wasn't because it was too narrow.  I'm glad keitaro checked it out.  I've got two ginzas still boxed in the office.  I'm holidaying in Thailand for a couple of weeks with Mrs Ghan.  Almost makes me want to come home early ... almost ...

 

Cheers

 

The_Ghan

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hey all jus thought i'd mention the ginza subway is drop in decoder dcc compatable

 

I can't think of any single recent Kato tooling that isn't...

Ain't necessarily so. I got my ED16's today and while the circuit board is the same design and shape as most recent electric and diesel locos it's different enough that no drop-in decoders appear to fit, the NGDCC decoders for the DE10 and later EF65 are close but not close enough as are other decoders pictured on the NGDCC website. It looks like my options are to hard wire a decoder or wait a while and see if NGDCC comes up with one.

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hey all a quick vid of the ginza's running You can watch in 1080 p sorry but the video was done on my 7d and i was a bit lazy in manual focusing, however it displays the awesome new LED kit in action. It's not really as bright as it looks in video and would look epicly awesome decked out in a subway full of passengers.

 

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Holy crap that is way too bright.. I do like that it doesn't flicker. On a related note, I honestly think those bright white/blue "HID" LED headlights they used (like in the Sonic, Super Oozora, etc..) was a huge mistake. The only way to make them realistic was to paint the headlight lenses.

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They do seem awfully bright. Scaling lighting is really tough, one of those things that changes in the minds eye. Actually at the scale distance we usually look at our model trains you would see very little light from houses, trains and cars in real life, but in modeling it usually looks like you want more light than that. The issue usually is that in the model you don't have all the light sources you usually do in a real life scene, so folks tend to turn up the fre light sources they do have.

 

Then there is the fact that light intensity drops at the inverse square of the distance from the source.this means that an led will look a lot brighter at one foot on a layout than 150 LEDs at 150 feet in real life. Light does not scale linearly.

 

I've done some exhibit model lighting for photography and was always surprised what lighting that made a great photo did not look great to the naked eye or that realistic. So it's one of those odd things in modeling that is a bit of a real odd mix...

 

Jeff

 

Ps curt's layout has quite nice night lighting as he has most of the usual city and town light sources at lower levels.

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Even the old lights were "too bright", although if you paint the interior darker colors (I used gray floors and dark blue seats on the one commuter train I did, to match a prototype photo) and add figures, the light doesn't look quite as bright any more.  It can be really hard to judge lighting intensity in a video, so I wouldn't read too much into this one; compare how bright the building lighting was in comparison. The camera is probably exagerating things here.

 

The thing that impresses me about the video, aside from the lack of any flicker at all, is how even the light is.  With the old kits you get a bright spot at the end where the LED is, and it gets much darker by the far end.  I don't see that here.

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The thing that impresses me about the video, aside from the lack of any flicker at all, is how even the light is.  With the old kits you get a bright spot at the end where the LED is, and it gets much darker by the far end.  I don't see that here.

 

in the longer size cars it does a bit still and you need to make sure you get the led right infront of the plastic.

 

It looks better in the ginza cause they shorties

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the longer size cars it does a bit still and you need to make sure you get the led right infront of the plastic.

I used scrap foil tape to secure the lens to the decoder holder and got the lighting I wanted and it held the lens in place. Just don't use colored tape like capstan. it'll color the interior.

 

Still interested in smoothing out the gazillion older FL11 I have in all the bullets.

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Anyone know what was actually improved upon from the original release?

 

http://www.1999.co.jp/eng/10144224

 

This is regarding the newest release of the EF63.

 

It might be possible that the 'improved' wording refers to the actual changes to the production locos. Some sites referred to that wording when describing changes to the different sub-types. As far as I can see, the only improvements mentioned  for Type 1 and Type 2 are a slightly changed position for the lightning arrestor, and tail-light mountings being re-designed. However looking at Kato's illustrations of both sub-types in their Japanese page, the tail-light mountings appear to be similar. Confused?

 

Angus

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kato is doing the video train again

 

NOT DCC COMPATABLE!!!

 

Meaning it won't run on 00?  Well, we'll just going to disconnect the DCC booster and slip in a DC power pack for that track line.

 

Maybe, just maybe we can change the body shell to go with our layouts.

 

https://www.e-katomodels2.com/img/goods/1/camera%20okyakusama.pdf

 

I reserved one anyway.

KatoCameraOkyakusama.pdf

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The camera looks like a wireless minicamera from the photo with HS's listing (like this one; it even has the "Type S" on the receiver), which means all it takes from the rails is power.  You could probably do a DCC conversion to run the train, and put in a simple rectifier/capacitor to turn track power into filtered DC for the camera itself. Or buy one of these (no idea if that store's any good, just found it via google).

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