Printing press plates for cards

[Mark70Z]

Originally Posted by steve B

Modern stuff will typically only have four plates/colors. Topps did a few things a bit differently at times, and did a lot more proofing prototyping, etc than the place I worked. We pretty much did almost no proofing at all. Maybe a mockup to get customer approval, but I wasn't involved in the sales end at all.

I think Topps did so much because they needed a lot of approvals for the different sets.

Because they did so much, some of what they did is pretty foreign to me. For example I never saw one of the transparent overlay proofs until Topps vault started selling them.

I think once the proofing was over their production system was very close to what I'm familiar with. Steve B

Steve...just so you know you were the one I was referring to when it came to going over the printing process in the past (I think it was in a thread referring to progressive proofs if I'm not mistaken). Anyway, if the modern cards have 4 plates, how many did the more vintage cards have? Was it one for each color? I've seen as many as 10 progressive proofs; does that mean they used 10 printing plates... We know in this example it's at least 6.