Anasazi37

No, unfortunately. The decal sheet master files represent a substantial investment on my part (time and money), so I can't just give them away. It's the equivalent of asking Captain America (John Moscato) to give you all of his molds for the various resin Macross kits he's designed, for free, so that you can make your own kits. The Hasegawa decals (I have the scans, too) are 1/72 scale and can't simply be resized for use with the Yamato 1/48 valks (or 1/60's, for that matter). Many of the designs require modification so that they will fit properly. I used them as a base for many of my sets, but ended up having to re-render almost every single one so that everything would look right.

ALPS only discontinued operations in the US, which included their repair/replacement program and ink supplies. I researched the MD-5500 option pretty thoroughly before deciding to close up shop. At the time I concluded that it was too expensive, with respect to both time and money--and a bit too risky, since I'd have to deal directly with the manufacturer in Japan (my Japanese is terrible). I was most worried about repair/replacement. ALPS printers break down at the drop of a hat. When that happened in the past, I simply shipped my printer out to ALPS in California and they sent you a refurbished one for $350--generally within a week. I've actually lost track of how many times that happened while printing Macross decals over the years, which is a bit scary. In fact, at one point I had two printers in continuous rotation between my house and the repair facility so that I could minimize down time. I subsidized a lot of the constant repair costs so that I could keep the decals affordable for everyone. The MD-5500 is twice the price, though, plus you'd presumably have to ship the printer back to New Zealand (or Japan) and back any time there is a problem with it. You also burn through a lot of ink when printing decals. When I did the math on all of this, it didn't add up for me. It looks like the ink at alps-supplies.com is about the same price as what I'm used to paying, though, so that's a good thing. As for attempting to scale up the sample pictures of the decal sets I post online for printing, I wouldn't recommend it. Those are reduced resolution, low quality versions designed to show some detail, but not enough so that you can print them yourself (I put a lot of work into those sets). Tango Papa decals makes the best ALPS-friendly paper, hands down. I've pretty much tried them all and suffered accordingly before finding Tango Papa. Vector-based artwork is definitely the way to go if you want clean lines, solid fill, and easily scalable graphics--but it does require specialized software like Illustrator, some drafting skills, and a lot of time (if you want to do it right). I can probably answer some additional questions, but I don't have a lot of time and don't regularly check the MW forums these days.

VERY cool. Makes me wish that I had the time to get back into customization and decal production. Thanks for posting the pic--it made my day.