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Posted By: hankron

Making the printing plates is complicated and time consuming (up front cost), but the process is less expensive than photographs if you're doing mass production-- like printing newspapers or magazines cards. Also, if you are printing a newspaper, where it's text and pictures, you want everything as part of one printing plate, instead of words and pasted-in photographs. For companies, it's not a matter of theory as practicalness. The newspapers were the first to use half-tone, down the road baseball cards. With any commercial technology, different industries and even individual companies started using a process at different times. So it's never a case that on June 23 1882 everyone started using a technology.

You can find old half-tone printing plates around, and they will have a physical in-relief surface.