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I've been talking with Tim for a few weeks - he is getting close to shutting down as his email shows:

"Yes, I am down to only one printer which works fully and I am almost out of ALPS cartridges (except white). As even the base CMY and black ink cartridges are now getting expensive, I only buy one or two as and when needed. I think I will close the web-site now, as the domain name lease has expired and I do enough business to justify keeping the domain name and the hosting charges . Let me know which sets you need, as I better get printing the remaining sets that I need for my own cars, while this printer is still good. Although I may be able to use some of the faulty printers, which no longer not stay in register when overlaying the different color images, to print CMY images and separate white under lay images and then combine the two directly on the body. This is not difficult to do and produces acceptable results, if a little more time consuming."

I just got an order from him today and as usual, they are marvelous. Should I start crying now or later if he goes out of business? Tim is a great artist and makes just some of the absolute best decals ever. He's a great guy too and I've been very blessed to get to use his stuff on most of my cars.

Get your orders in quick boys.

Eep!!! I just got an order from him back in October or so - looks like I may need to get another order in to him before it is too late! :o
Thank you for the heads up David!!!

This is tragic. I hate to see things like this. What is the big mystery about these ALPS printers, anyway? The outfit folded long ago, so what is stopping people from making them again? All that's needed is an old one to reverse engineer, and since the new copyright and patent laws went into effect, everything is up for grabs. Its going on all over the place and has been for years. So, why can't we have these printers anymore?

For so long the ALPs has been the only option for white other than VERY expensive dye sublimation printers. ALPs is very old technology, and not suitable for printing photo-realistic graphics which have been appearing on cars more and more recently.

Oki have finally come up with a white toner laser printer which sounds very interesting. The toner isn't exactly cheap and at AUD3200 RRP neither is the printer, but it is at least an option. There is not current a solution for silver and gold though.

The Oki option does sound a promising option. I really wish I had the funds to buy one.