So, Eduard decal film....
As mentioned above, a few years back Eduard began printing their decals with the carrier film on the OUTSIDE of the decal. This has caused much consternation and discussion in the past on several forums and, to date, I've not had experience with these. Well, now I do and here are my observations:
The decals behave pretty much like any other - chuck them in water then apply them with your favourite setting solution as you normally would. I did find that the decals loosened from the backing paper quite quickly so there's no need to let them sit in water for more than about 15 seconds. Small stencil decals should be dipped for once second and put on your work surface and excess water blotted off. The decal will be loose right away.
Once on the model and cured, the decals look pretty good as is and, as some reviewers say, could pass without any further work. Below is a brutal close-up of the underside national insignia with the film still on - mostly. I meant to take a picture of the entire decal before pealing it but I guess I forgot - sorry. As you can see, the decal has sat down pretty well with the carrier film in place but you can also see that I started to peel it away with my tweezers. Brett Green said he used mineral spirits and a brush to peel the film but, since I didn't have any in house, I went and simply lifted the film with tweezers starting at one edge.
The peeling continues. The stuff comes off mostly in large pieces but does tear so it took about 5 minutes of peeling to get the whole film off this one decal. The film on the tiny inspection port stencil decals came off very easily with a simple rub of the tweezers. The film pieces are statically charged so stick to everything and you have to go over the model surface with a brush to remove any small flakes. You can see a few below.
Here is the finished decal with the entire film removed. What's left is a decal that has no visible thickness so it does look like it's painted on. I like that. The finish is very matte, which I also like.
The big "A2" decal had to conform to a MG bulge and didn't go so well, even after a couple of applications of Solvaset.
For this one, I ended up chipping the unstuck bits away and I also opened the ejector chutes. The decal in the below pic has had the film already peeled off.
Here's the "A2" with the film peeled and touched up with paint. The chute openings have been painted and I also went over the magazine access panel lines with a scalpel to cut through the decal and hit the line with some more Solvaset.
The underside decals are now finished so I flipped the model over onto its golf cart and started on the uppers.
As you can see, the yellow A2's have not been applied to the fuselage sides and that's because of one of the disadvantages of this system. If you have decals with are to be applied over top of other decals, as these are, and if you want to peel the films, then you have to wait 24 hours, peel the film, then apply the second decal over top. In this case, the yellow A2 decal needs to partially cover the fuselage national insignia so I have to wait.
So, in my opinion, the only pro to this type of decal is that in the end it looks better that the usual run of the mill types with the film on the back. The cons are: fiddly removal with risk of damage, longer application duration, overlapped decals need to be sequenced.
So, not everyone may feel that the extra effort is worth the result. I do. I think that removing the film is results in decals that look great.