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Posted By: warshawlaw

The idea that the printing costs were much higher for these cards than for other cards from the era has been repeated for years but without any support. Remember, the cards are not photographs printed on photo paper; they are printed matter (David, wanna jump in here with some astute observations as to techniques?), same as the prior years' cards. Look at them under a magnifier and you can see all the little dots. I would even guess that these cards cost less to produce than the drawn cards because the drawn cards had full color too and had to be created from photos (and an artist paid to do it).

I have no idea why they'd do a B&W set too; maybe they were testing it out as an idea, or maybe someone thought that B&W looked really nice and wanted to see if it would sell. One thing is for sure, which is that there are far fewer B&W cards out there than color cards, which kind of contradicts the idea that the cards were issued to replace the color cards--wouldn't you expect more of them rather than fewer?