As every year at this time, eyes (and ears) of the modellers from around the world are waiting for the news from Nuremberg, place of the annual Toy show, which traditionally is a place for plastic model producers to announce what their plans are in the next year and what goodies modellers are going to be served.

Already at this time we can say that there is not reason to be disappointed. Number of new kits were announced and presented, some of them quite unexpected. Depending on whom you ask, the “biggest” surprise announcement would be different, but for me the single most interesting release announced was by Meng – D9R bulldozer:

This exotic vehicle was few years ago released in resin by Vajra models and for quite many times I felt tempted to get. Luckily I didn’t. I was hoping that some plastic model producer would get inspired and bring it out in plastic. It’s not surprising that this company is Meng as their recent releases of Israeli armoured vehicles are quite popular, in large part also due to the quality of the models.

Fans of Israeli armour in general have very little reasons to complain – Tamiya has presented in Nuremberg their Tiran 5, so that finally you do not need a resin conversion to build this piece. Some weeks ago, Kinetic also announced release of the M109 self-propelled howitzer (though in this case I am bit suspicious, having seen Kinetic’s first release of M109 I was quite disappointed with the level of detail as I have already mentioned in this blog).

There were also quite a few other notable announcements. I would like to highlight Italeri announcement of a new Renault FT-17, which so far has not attracted as much attention as I would expect, but I consider release of good quality model of this tank to be long overdue.

Trumpeter has announced quite a few pieces for the fans of the Russian armour (including T-80) and Riich models presented their Universal carrier (I am hoping we won’t need to wait too long for this one. There were number of other interesting announcements by other companies such as IBG and Hobby Boss. For photo report from the Nuremberg, make sure to visit Prime Portal page here.