Quote:
Originally Posted by drcy
akin to baseball card printing plates.
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Exactly the analogy I was prepared to make before reading further down the page. One difference between negatives and printing plates though being that you can actually use a negative or transparency to produce the end product, a photograph, much more easily than you can use a printing plate to produce a card
One advantage transparencies have over negatives though is that you can view and enjoy the transparencies without having to make a print or scan/invert the image. Sure, they're a bit smaller than most baseball cards, even tobacco cards, but the image quality is a heck of a lot better. And when they're in a slide mount, there really isn't a whole lot of difference between those and cards as far as feel and how you handle them (just don't bare-finger the film portion). In fact, I often store individual slides in a toploader right along with the cards if they're not part of a larger collection (in which case 20-pocket pages are more convenient). With all the crap they're cramming in cards these days, I'm actually surprised we don't see more transparency cards (there have been a few on the non-sport side as "film" cards), especially with the process for mounting a frame of film in a mount being very similar with how it would be mounted in a card.