Introduction

The following introduction is as supplied by Tankograd:

Detailed photographical walkaround on the restored vehicles Panther Ausf. G gun tank, Jagdpanther tank destroyer and now also the Bergepanther armoured recovery vehicle. Reworked and enlarged edition with 40 more pages and, for the first time, 47 colour plates showing camouflage patterns. Perfected for modellers and tank technology buffs!

Review

Tankograd has revisited one of their past offerings and with the benefit of a facelift and extra cont released Panther Colours and Details from the In Detail range of books. Here we are provided with a soft backed book printed in a landscape format. A number of authors had their input with this release consisting of Ralph Zwilling, Henry Hoppe, Jochen Vollert and Slawomir Zajaczkowski. We are now provided with 136 pages of a good quality gloss stock paper. The Panther based vehicles covered in this release are the Panther G, Jagdpanther and Bergepanther.

What I class as the dedicated text in the title is provided in both German and English on the left and right of each page. The text is presented in a font that is easy to read and is further helped by the font size. When you switch to the photographic aspect of the title I feel that this book offers a visual treat. The photographs are of vehicles still about today and so museum examples as they are commonly referred to and this does mean that some details may not be perfectly accurate. What I really like is that the vehicles have been photographed outside and on grass; so while not filthy they do give an idea of where dirt accumulates in the field.

The benefit of this title to the modeller is that the vehicles are covered not just from outside as you get an inside look that is harder to come by. Picture quality is as you would expect and top notch quality wise. Most of the photographs are accompanied by a caption in German and English unless it is just a general view. At the end of the book are a large number of side profile drawings which are most helpful for camouflage patterns used and where; again this come with duel language captions. The book does have the usual limited print run of 999 so don’t hang about or you may be disappointed.

Conclusion

I did not know this book was on route to me and is one of those offerings that grabs and shakes you as you look through what is provided. Next plus is that the Panthers covered in this release all have great appeal to the modeller as a one stop visual reference. The cost of this release is €36 and I feel that is a reasonable cost for a book of this quality and content. My only complaint is that only 999 copies are printed and so 1he 1000th buyer is out of luck and can expect to have to dig deep to get a copy.