Resin Kits vs PVC Figures: You Are Buying Two Different Things

A PVC figure and a resin figure kit end up on the same shelf, at similar sizes, often of the same character. That is where the similarity stops. One is a finished object made in a factory in a batch of thousands, painted before it was boxed. The other is a set of bare parts made after you ordered them, which becomes a finished object only if you make it one.

Most comparisons of the two try to declare a winner, which is the wrong question, because almost nobody is genuinely choosing between them. What people actually want to know is what each one is, what the price includes, and which of the two matches how they want to spend an evening. This guide answers that, and it is honest about the things a PVC figure does better, because there are several.

Two products that only look like the same thing

The clearest way to see the difference is to look at what the manufacturer calls each one.

Good Smile Company, one of the largest makers of scale figures, describes its products on its own product pages with lines like "Painted 1/7th scale ABS and PVC figure with stand included" and, for its lower priced line, "Painted plastic non-scale complete product with stand included". The Japanese term behind that last phrase is the industry's own, and it means exactly what it says. The thing you buy is complete.

A resin kit is the opposite of a complete product. It is parts. The nearest established term for it is a garage kit, a category that has existed since long before 3D printing and which has always meant a model sold in pieces for the buyer to assemble and finish themselves.

So a PVC figure is a finished collectible and a resin kit is closer to a raw material. Once you hold that distinction, the rest of the comparison stops being a contest and starts being a description.

What arrives in a PVC box

A painted figure, assembled, on its stand, ready to put down and look at. That is the entire proposition and it is a good one.

The material is polyvinyl chloride, usually alongside ABS for the parts that need to be rigid, which is why manufacturer specifications so often read "ABS and PVC" rather than PVC alone. Some lines specify ATBC-PVC, which is PVC softened with acetyl tributyl citrate, a phthalate free plasticiser used in toys, medical devices and food packaging.

The paint is not what most people assume. A factory report from inside Good Smile's own plant describes a facility where, besides the shaping of the parts, essentially everything is done by hand, with one figure using around a hundred colours. The maker's own blog explains that fine repeated details like eyes are applied with stamping machines because doing them by hand would take too long, working from the lightest colour to the darkest. Quality control there rejects a face over a small black dot.

That is a lot of human labour, and it is the reason a good PVC figure looks the way it does. Anyone painting a figure at home is competing with a production line of people who do nothing else.

Most scale figures are a single fixed pose. Not all of them: some lines are explicitly articulated, and manufacturer specifications say so. Assume fixed unless the spec says otherwise.

What arrives in ours

Unpainted resin parts, printed after you ordered them, in the Netherlands. Supports removed, washed, fully UV cured, test fitted, checked by hand and bagged part by part, in recycled paper and bubble wrap. No paint, no brushes, no glue, no primer.

How much surface work is left depends on the tier you pick, and the three are not marketing tiers, they are different amounts of our labour. Finish levels explained covers them properly:

• Bronze, DIY Ready. Supports removed, washed, cured, checked. You sand, fill, assemble, prime and paint. Usually ships in 2 to 5 business days.
• Silver, Detail Ready. Support marks sanded and visible holes filled by us. You assemble, finish, prime and paint. Usually ships in 4 to 8 business days.
• Gold, Paint Ready. Gaps filled and the figure primed in black, white or grey. You assemble and paint. Usually ships in 6 to 14 business days.

Even Gold is not a finished figure. It is a primed one. If the appeal of a shelf is that things on it are already done, that is worth knowing before you order rather than after.

Key takeaways

• A PVC figure is a complete product; a resin kit is parts.
• Factory PVC paintwork is mostly hand applied, by people who only do that.
• Our highest tier arrives primed, not painted.

Licensing is why the two catalogues do not overlap

This is the part most comparisons skip, and it explains more than any material property does.

A mass produced PVC figure is officially licensed. Look at any manufacturer's product page and there is a rights holder copyright line on it, naming the studio or publisher that owns the character. That licence is expensive and it is negotiated per character, which means a factory only commits to one when it is confident of selling in volume. The result is a catalogue of popular characters from large franchises, made in large batches, and nothing else.

We work the other way round. We buy a commercial licence from the digital sculptor who created each model, which is what gives us the right to print and sell physical copies, and it means a share of every kit reaches the artist who made it. That licence is with the sculptor and not with the studio that owns the character, so sculpts of characters from games, anime and films are unofficial fan art, and we label them that way on every product page.

We would rather say that plainly than let anyone find out later. Anyone telling you their fan art figures are officially approved by the rights holder is not being straight with you.

The practical consequence for a buyer is the interesting bit. Official licensing gives you a guarantee of provenance and a narrow catalogue. Sculptor licensing gives you no such guarantee and an enormously wider catalogue, including characters no factory will ever tool up for, poses that no official figure exists in, and pieces by named individual artists rather than by a company.

Price, and what the number actually buys

Manufacturers publish their recommended prices, so this can be compared honestly rather than guessed at.

Good Smile Company's own product pages list, among others, a 1/7 scale figure at 19,360 yen, another 1/7 at 20,900 yen, a 1/6 articulated figure at 24,200 yen and a 1/4 scale figure at 33,000 yen. Its entry level line starts from 4,800 yen, raised from 3,900 yen in April 2022, a change the company attributed to raw material and freight costs.

Those are Japanese list prices. What you pay in Europe depends on the exchange rate and on an importer's margin, and it is usually a good deal more, which is worth factoring in before comparing anything.

Our own prices sit on every product page with all three tiers side by side. To take one concrete example, the Ranma kit is 38,99 euro at Bronze, 52,99 at Silver and 76,99 at Gold. What that does not include is primer, paint, brushes or glue, and if you own none of those, the first kit costs meaningfully more than the kit.

So the honest summary on price is that a resin kit is usually cheaper than an equivalent PVC figure and is not cheap once you count what you need to finish it, and the first one is the expensive one because everything you buy alongside it lasts for years. Setting up to paint covers what that actually is.

Size, and why the ratios do not line up

Both worlds use scale ratios and they do not translate between each other, which trips people up constantly.

From published manufacturer heights, a 1/7 PVC figure comes in around 240 to 247mm, a 1/6 around 265mm, and a 1/4 around 305mm. One 1/8 figure is listed at approximately 250mm, taller than both 1/7 examples, because that measurement includes the stand.

Our range behaves the same way for the same reason, which is that a ratio describes the character and not the object. A 1/9 kit on this site measures 18.8cm and another 1/9 measures 34cm, because one is standing still and the other is mid leap on a rock. Sizing a display case goes through this properly, and scale versus proportion explains why two figures at the same ratio can look nothing alike.

The only reliable move, in either world, is to read the stated height. Every product page here carries one.

How each one ages, which is where it gets interesting

Neither material is archival, and the ways they fail are different enough to matter if you plan to keep things for decades.

PVC. Plasticised PVC is one of the materials museum conservators worry about, and there is real published work on it because collections are full of the stuff. The recognised failure is plasticiser migration: the softener that makes PVC flexible gradually moves to the surface and leaves. That shows up as a tacky or oily film that attracts dust and sticks to whatever it touches, as yellowing, and eventually as the object becoming harder and more brittle and less able to support its own weight.

It is important not to overstate this. A survey of a large design collection found yellowing in about 30 percent of PVC objects, surface weeping in about 22 percent, and creasing in about 20 percent, while around 40 percent of the objects in those plastics families remained in good condition. PVC pieces were roughly evenly split between good and poor condition, and they were far from the worst material in the collection. It is also worth saying that this literature is about plasticised PVC in general rather than about figure grade ATBC-PVC specifically, and nobody has published a study on twenty year old anime figures.

The faster failure is heat. PVC softens and bends at high temperature, and warped figures after a hot summer are a well documented collector experience. A sunny windowsill is the enemy.

Cured resin. Ours has its own list. Printer manufacturers state plainly that parts left in sunlight become more brittle and change colour, from both the ultraviolet light and the heat. Fine parts can snap. Heat warps it too, and a warped part cannot be unwarped.

So the storage advice is nearly identical for both: out of direct sun, away from radiators, stable temperature. The difference is that a resin figure's paint is yours, so a chip or a fade is repairable with the paints already on your desk, while a factory paint job is not something you can match. Storing resin kits covers the detail.

Key takeaways

• PVC's long term issue is plasticiser migration: stickiness, yellowing, embrittlement.
• Resin's are UV yellowing, brittleness and heat warping.
• Both want the same shelf: no direct sun, no radiator, stable temperature.

The resin we print in, and why it changes by use

Worth stating because it is a real difference between a printed kit and a moulded figure, and because it is specific rather than a slogan.

Display pieces here are printed in resins like Chitu Conjure Sculpt and other high quality textured resins. Wargaming pieces use resins like Ameralabs TGM-7 or Wargamer by Fauxhammer. The reasoning is that display pieces need crisp detail and being a little more fragile is an acceptable trade, since they are standing on a shelf. Wargaming pieces get handled and knocked about, so they need more flex and can give up a little sharpness for it.

A PVC figure has no equivalent choice. The material is set by the tooling and the production line, and it is the same for a display statue as for anything else in the range. Being able to pick the formulation per use case is one of the genuine advantages of printing to order, and it is not a marketing point, it is just what happens when nobody has committed to a mould.

Which one you actually want

Straightforwardly, without pretending.

Buy the PVC figure if you want the character on the shelf and not the project. If you want an officially licensed piece from a major franchise. If you like a specific factory paint job, which is a completely reasonable thing to like given who painted it. If you have no space, time or inclination for solvents and dust. If it is a gift for someone who does not paint.

Buy the resin kit if the painting is the point rather than an obstacle. If the character or the pose you want does not exist as an official figure. If you want to control the colours, the skin tone, the base, the whole reading of the piece. If you want a larger sculpt than the PVC lines offer at a comparable price. If you would enjoy owning something that only you have finished that way.

One thing we will not tell you is how to strip and repaint a PVC figure, which is the obvious middle path. We have not tested it, the paint sits on a soft plasticised surface, and the solvents that lift paint are exactly the ones most likely to attack that surface. Everything published about it is somebody selling stripper. If you try it, test on the underside of the base.

What we sell, and what we do not

We sell unpainted kits. We do not sell finished figures, we do not sell PVC figures, and we do not sell paint. If what you want is a painted figure on a shelf next week, we are not the shop, and there is no version of this article where we pretend otherwise.

What we can say is that the thing people most often worry about with a made to order kit, which is whether the parts turn up in good condition, is the thing our reviews mostly talk about. The shop rating currently sits at 5 out of 5 across 88 reviews, and packaging and print quality come up repeatedly in them. That is a shop wide rating rather than a per product one, and you can read them on any product page rather than take our word for it.

The rest of the range is in the full Remerlinds catalogue. Every listing carries the sculptor's name, the scale, the stated height and all three tiers with their prices, and choosing a kit is the place to start if this is your first.

Recommended reading

• Resin versus plastic, which does the same comparison against injection moulded wargaming plastic rather than PVC.
• Finish levels explained, for how much of the work you want to do.
• Assembling your first resin figure, which is the step a PVC figure skips entirely.
• Choosing a primer, for the first thing that goes on bare resin.