Rhett,
That was pretty much my thoughts except that decal printers are pretty
rare, so with present technology unlikely to be in local hobby shops.
However, other hobbies need decals so it's likely a major city would
have the volume to make such a venture possible.
The only printer that printed white was common to our hobby was the
long-gone Alps. I remember seeing them in local consumer computer super
stores a few years ago. One would have to assume that they left the
market because the normal user didn't need that feature. Hence the need
for a larger commercial unit based on volume. All one needs is one of
those printers and Bill Lane's 200 hours of artwork!
And of course, this brings up the main issue with all these semi-defunct
companies. Those pieces of artwork maybe never turn a dime for the
owners or grace my freight cars!
Bob Werre
PhotoTraxx
--- In [email protected] <mailto:S-Scale%40yahoogroups.com>, Bob
Werre <bob@...> wrote:
> The solution for all this is for the decal people to simply sell "one
> time or multiple use rights" to their artwork.
I've often wondered why Microscale wouldn't do something like this!
How great would it be to go into a hobby shop, walk up to a computer,
select the sheets (or portions of sheets) that you want, hit print and
walk out with fresh decals?! The price you'd pay would be based on the
number of artwork sheets you accessed, the print area and the number
of colors. Microscale could provide the hobby shops with the printers
and decal sheets, the hobby shop doesn't have to inventory the decals
(saves space and saves taxes on stuff that doesn't sell), and the
hobbyist gets fresh decals on demand.
If the artwork were stored in a vector graphics format, you could
adjust the scale to whatever size fits your model. If the vector
graphics format were a common one, hobbyists could upload their
artwork (kind of like Shapeways, only for decals) and anyone could
have access to someone else's artwork. If you didn't have a local
hobby shop, you could order directly from Microscale in this manner
too. Since this would apply to all scales and the military and car
modelers too, it'd be truly amazing what could be done! Want those
1:24 auto decals scaled down to fit 1:64 autos for a model railroad? Done!
I only use Microscale here because, to my knowledge, they're the only
model railroad decal manufacturer left. Everyone else is a custom
decal business. But there's no reason one of the custom guys couldn't
do the same thing!
Regards,
Rhett Graves
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/S-Scale/post;_ylc=X3oDMTJwbGJwcGFiBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzI1MjE5MARncnBzcElkAzE3MDUzNDY3MzEEbXNnSWQDOTYxNzQEc2VjA2Z0cgRzbGsDcnBseQRzdGltZQMxMzY3NDA5Mjkw?act=reply&messageNum=96174>
