Not all stamps are born equal. There can be lots of minor quality flux that fits into printers guidelines of acceptable variation and printing conditions. In addition there are all sorts of errors, freaks and oddities (like printers waste) that ends up one way or to another to stamp collectors albums.

Print quality

A common phenomena with 19th century stamps printing process was worning of the plates. The more stamps were printed using same plates, the less accurate the fine details became. And at some point this usually lead to re-engraving of the plates.

Though printing technology has advanced, the quality of print can still vary hugely as the above picture of Romanian ship definitive stamp shows:

External matter, such as dust particles, causing various pernanent or temporary printing flaws (such as above) is a cause of joy for EFO collectors.

A good grade copy stamp should be of the best (or at least average) printing quality.

Colors

Another major part of printing process are colors. A desired grade / quality for most collectors is a sample with accurate and vivid colors.

However, especially for many of the older issues, there can be huge differences in amount and quality of ink – causing over- and underinked print impressions, poor impression quality etc.

Even new stamps are not protected, as accuracy in which the colors are aligned / placed into design can vary notably:

Centering and perforation / cutting

In most cases, the goal of the printer has been to produce stamps where design is aligned to the somewhat center of the stamp, and stamps are easy to separate from each other using the provided perforation (or cutting with recent self-adhesive stamps).

The collectors norm is to obtain copies with perfect centering: there should be equal number of whitespace on all sides between the design and perforation. It sounds really simple, but far too many collectors have gone IMHO overboard with this by trying to stare tenths of millimeters.

Things become a little harder when one deals with perforation errors. What is the line between a poorly centered stamp and a perforation error (besides the obvious diagonal perforation errors)?

To be continued some time next week…

PS. Totally off-topic, but today (Jan 29th) is Stamp Collecting Blog’s 1st anniversary. Happy birthday to all readers

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