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hankronPete, the white writing on the N172 & N173s is legitimate and original. The Goodwin photographer wrote on the glass negatives and used the negatives to make the paper photos for the cards. The writing on the negative would in the image.
The problem is that you can't do that with a tintype. A tintype is a totally different photographic process (for starters, there is no glass negative involved) and the photographer couldn't include writing on the final tintype.
The tintype is a primitive process-- the same kind used to make the first photo in 1839--, and it had limits what it could do in the image. It's kind of like comparing a 1996 computer animation program and a 2004 animation program. You can animate with both, but the 2004 software can produce certain special effects that didn't exist with the 1996 software.
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A second theory about the Old Judge tintypes that I suspect has been thought of is that the tintypes are photographs of actual cabinet cards. In, say 1890, some guy took a photo of a N173 he had and made a tintype. At first this might explain why there could be writing in these Old Judge tintypes-- because it's a photograph of the writing. This, however, is also not possible.
Most collectors of tintypes know that there are two big qualites about a tintype: that the photo is made of of a sheet of metal, and that the images are backwards. Left is right and right is left. Just like looking in a mirror. Again, the tintype process was old and, except in rarest sistuations, couldn't produce a foreward image. This means that if someone in 1890 made a tintype of his N173 cabinet, everthing would be backwards in the tintype's image, including the writing.