Suggestions for a dedicated decal printer.

My suggestion is an Epson XP200 - I got mine on sale at Staples for ~$50 but full price isn't much more; doesn't have all the bells and whistles of higher cost ones (but it is wireless) but works great. I highly recommend a printer that uses pigmented ink as opposed to dye based regardless of brand. Epson's DuraBrite ink is pigment based; their Celeria (sp) ink is dye based. Pigment inks, when dry, are relatively water stable, don't bleed when you ovecoat your decal with lacquer, enamel or acrylic. Also, pigments are more light stable and don't fade with time as much as dye based. Too, there are variations in dye based ink formulations such that one might not bleed when over sprayed with e.g. lacquer while another brand would. I do a lot of ink jet printing on tissue and would never go back to dye based. My photo printer is a Canon Pro 9000 dye based printer and does work fine for decals. HP makes pigment based printers but beware of ink cost. 4 color inks for my Epson XP200 are about $25.00 ( HP that I tried was $125.00 for four inks).

I recently bought an HP 2512 just for decals. It was on sale for forty bucks.  I bought it with the idea that I could return it for ANY reason within two weeks, so as soon as I got home I made a set of decals and they worked fine.

My normal printer is an Epson XP600, and the inks for that printer run with almost any overcoat. I have had good luck with older Epsons, but not with that one!  Problem is that printer mfgs often use different types of inks with different model printers.  So I recommend making sure there is a generous return policy, then buy a cheapie that looks like it will do the job, try making a set of decals, and see how they turn out.

I didn't worry about ink costs for a dedicated decal printer because I figured I would not be making THAT many sheets of decals, so believe the cost of even expensive inks will not be a factor. Homemade decals will always be cheaper than storebought ones :-)    I often combine a couple of sets of decals on one sheet when I can, to save wasting decal paper (I find the paper cost to be more significant than the ink (this of course would not be true if the decal printer were my everyday computer printer.

Well, I picked up a used HP 6500 at work they decided to trash.

The wireless, web connections, and scan to PC were all really flaky. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't! No clearly evident rhyme or reason. It was costing more for the techs to work on it than it was worth. Not a good thing in a business environment.

It prints just fine. I don't care about the special features not working as I'm only going to use it for decals.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

I use and ALPS printer.  These printers use resin cartridges so the decals are much like car or boat decals.  And completely none fading.  Other advantages of the ALPS cartridges are the selections.  they come in white, silver foil, silver metallic, gold foil, gold metallic, etc.  My ALPS 5000 can hold 7 cartridges at a time but less costly ALPS are also made .. and generally found on eBay.   There is an ALPS DECAL Yahoo group with tons of support.

There are many negatives to using an ALPS .. they are complicated to learn how to spot print, they are expensive and the printer heads can die on you, the cartridges are getting harder to find and it's a battle on eBay to get some.  You have to know a lot about graphics software such as Photoshop to use an ALPS.  Every color in the decal needs to be separated from the other colors .. you spot print one color at a time.  This is the only way to get nice sharp decals from the ALPS.  If you try to print in color without using spot printing, the ALPS will dither colored spots together as it attempts to get the exact look of the original picture.  The results are not good.

With some effort to learn how to separate the colors into their own "layers" spot printing will give you professional decals that will never fade !