Quoted from Doug_Duba:It is a current industry wide practice to have higher standards on playfields going into more expensive LEs.
Subpar playfield are stripped and rescreened or discarded and not used in any model.
We have been making playfields since 1977 and assembling pinball machines for less than two years. Remarkably producing playfields still remains our biggest challenge.
Quality expectations of collectors greatly exceed those of the operators that originally purchased the games.
If I built a time machine and brought brand new Williams machines from 1998 to the present, they wouldn’t meet the expectations of some collectors.
We have three original Monster Bash playfields in house and there are significant variances between the three. We would have rejected one playfield and the other two would not meet our standards for an LE.
The playfield is the backbone of a pinball machine, it is perhaps the most important component. We are very focused on producing outstanding playfields.
Industry practice? This is certainly not widely known or publicized to pinball buyers by other manufacturers.