Foghorn Leghorn Posted January 31 Posted January 31 To cut a long story short I've been searching for a supplier of affordable custom colour decals for some time. I've found one. https://waterslide.phoxyprinting.co.uk They use a colour laser to print onto clear decal sheet. But this ain't no cheapo, few hundred quid, printer, it's £3000+. They can also print gold and silver. And the price? An A5 sheet (eg microscale size) is £8 plus p&p. An A4 sheet is £11.50 plus p&p. They can print colour, or colour with a white underprint (the price above is for underprint) The toner colours used are the usual CMYK (K is black) so red, blue, green, grey etc will be half-toned (ie dots of colours to make other colours, eg grey would be dots of black and white). Navigating their website can be awkward so here's some links Colour print: here Colour print with white underprint: here (I've now got a better link for the website, see start of post) I got an A5 sheet with white underprint. I was initally a bit disappointed when I looked at the sheet but that changed when I used them. On my sheet I had thin lines of colour printed (CAG colours), the blue and green were good, the orange was disappointing, red was ok. I assume the yellow SHOULD have been pure Y toner, it might have been though it didn't look like it but it was certainly good enough. As I said, you have to remember this is laser toner which means half-toned colours, so the orange, for example, is a result of the limitations of CMYK. There was some registration issues, though very minor. I thought the black would be pure black toner but there's some red at the edge so it may not be pure black, but a mix to make black. They may be able to print a pure black (I've not asked) but my cheap B&W laser can print a decent black anyway. There was a minor white registration issue (see the right side of the red circle in the pics below) but that's being picky and that can be avoided by getting separate white and colour sheets printed and overlaying them. It's also a limitation of the print process. The white isn't solid (though I've had worse white decals with Printscale sheets), but that's solved by putting 2 layers down. The carrier is good, the decals are thin, so multiple layers aren't a problem. The decals are really easy to use but also really easy to fold on themselves. I put them on a matt(ish) surface and they really grabbed, so bear that in mind. Sharpness and size of print is good (600 dpi). I needed some outline numbers, so (mindful of registration) I printed the outline and inner as separate parts then overlayed them. The black over yellow was great, the black over grey was ok-ish but grey will always be hard for a laser to print. I used inkscape (which is free) to create the artwork. I supplied the artwork as an SVG file (remember to set all the artwork as 'outline to path') but they accept PNG as well. Considering the price, I can't see a drawback, they're not perfect but at this price they're great value. The basic fact is they can print white, which is the main drawback to making our own decals. I'll certainly be getting more sheets printed Here's some pics. I'll be honest, the grey outline looks way better in the pics than in real life. The separate N has had the right leg of it overlaid with a second layer of white decal, you can see how it's whiter. This is a screenshot of the artwork for the outlined number, to show how it was built up. FYI Dark grey has been used as the transparent background layer. 1 3
Mike Posted February 1 Posted February 1 They look pretty good, and a lot better than most of us would be able to print at home. If he's interested in joining us here to drum up some business, just get him to drop us a line I really must dig out my ALPS printer and learn how to use it and some design software one of these days. I have a couple of old laptops I refurbed to run XP and use with it, but I got side-tracked once that part had finished 2
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