Ebay #1860440706 e121 Ruth

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Posted By: MW

According to the majority of sources, halftone printing was first introduced in 1871. To give an example (N167s) where woodcut printing was used shows an exception rather than the rule. EVERY current process used to produce images on baseball cards involves a method by which the image is created from individual dots. This is also true of some 19th century cards and 99% of all 20th century cards.

To say that, "Real photo cards have no dot pattern" is not completely accurate. For images produced prior to halftoning, the terminology would have been "lines per inch." It is also not completely accurate to say that T206s "only have a dot pattern in isolated parts of the player picture." Find a 100X magnification source and you'll see the folly of this argument. It would be analogous to saying that there is no interstitial space between adjacent molecules in a compound.

In halftone printing, masks are used to define the where on the paper and how much of each color ink will be deposited in each halftone dot. These masks take the form of clear films called separations that are covered in a pattern of halftone dots and are produced as one mask for each color. This is where you are slightly confused. In halftone printing, the printer DOES determine the size and position of each halftone dot; however, each halftone dot is comprised of a number of even smaller dots called the imagesetter pixels. THIS is what determines the resolution. To say that a reprint can have a lower resolution and have more halftone dots is correct; but to say that a reprint can have a lower resolution and have more pixels per halftone dot is totally inaccurate.