1971 Topps Blue Border Steve Garvey?

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Mark70Z

Steve,

Thanks so much for the response. You add great insight when it comes to the printing process, which I know very little about.

Just one more question to help with my understanding. The "progression proofs" that Eric72 posted of the '76 Wayne Stephenson would be different than the Brooks Robinson's that were posted, is that correct? Those are typically how I see proofs, w/the normal colors used, black, yellow, blue, yellow and blue, etc. and are typically blank backed.

If the Brooks Robinsons have backs, they probably aren't progressive proofs.

Progressive proofs are used to check that each color layer prints properly, and that the colors are lined up correctly so the registration will be good over the entire sheet. (In Topps case....ummm....sort of...their registration wasn't always great. )
The stuff that should get caught at this stage is things like a player with the team banner the wrong color or wrong name. Or worse stuff like having one card out of place on one color so for instance Ed Jones always gets the blue layer from Dave Jones card.

That sort of thing has been missed fairly recently, one year Black Diamond had a whole bunch of wrong backs because the sheet layout for the front didn't match the layout for the back.
The few 91 Topps that have the pink background from a manager on a players card and the opposite are either mistakes that slipped past proofing, or partial wrong backs where the correct fronts got the wrong pink back layer but the correct Blue info/stats layer.

As you can see from the test sheet piece I showed Topps had a LOT of potential adjustment. The brief time I ran a press the farthest I had to move an entire plate was maybe 1-2mm. Getting the tension uneven on the plate would throw the registration off by a bit so it had to be adjusted evenly. They eliminated a lot of adjusting and proofing by making the plates so they would naturally line up almost exactly. But we were a high quality fairly short run sort of place. Topps printers were mostly trying to get a few million cards out the door as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Steve B