Some Asian countries seem have a very creative interpretation of copyright laws and after a number of kits released in the eighties and nineties by Korean firm Academy that were heavily "inspired" by Tamiya kits, Chinese manufacturer Trumpeter does the same thing with Tamiya and (serves them right!) Academy.

The problem with copies is that the mouldings are generally softer than the originals. I have one Academy copy of Tamiya’s late Tiger I (which has photoetched engine deck screens and one piece track) and it suffers from that syndrome although the loss of sharpness is acceptable, except for the figure.

In this kit, the tank parts are acceptable but the turret and roadwheels have definitely lost the most in the "process". The Tamiya turret is wrong anyway, and you could replace the roadwheels with a later type, done by CMD and MR-Models in resin and use a JS Models resin turret. The figure is also terrible. The high tech metal and photo-etched parts in the Tamiya kit are not included in the Trumpeter packaging, Trumpeter making a rather lame attempt at engine grilles by providing a sticker with little chrome squares sticking out...

The mine roller parts are copies of the Academy ones in their IDF M60A1 Blazer and Merkava II with mine roller kits. A few of the mine roller parts are newly tooled though and generally the mine roller matches the reference photos of the real thing shown on the box side (taken in a Russian museum) well.

Lastly, modeller Antonio Pang reported this in a thread about the Trumpeter T-72 on the Tank Guy bulletin board (quote used with permission) :

=quote=

"The rear of the Trumpeter T-72 has a problem-the parts do not fit together well and it makes the rear looks strange! Correcting this fault took hours of hard work and the result is still not as good as a Tamiya OOTB.

Take a closer look you would find that the lower hull of the Trumpeter kit bears a mark of a battery compartment that open outward that was closed on the mold. The same kit has been under another brand name years ago, the only different is now Trumpeter place the batteries inside."

=unquote=

Overall not that great a kit, I’d only recommend it if you need a T-72 to chop up for a conversion and are afraid of butchering the rather expensive Tamiya kit. Another possibility would be to buy it just for the KMT-5 mine roller : Trumpeter products are very cheap so the kit could be purchased just for the mine roller with the tank parts relegated to the spares box.