General Forum

Hey everyone! 

I tried to use the search function and didn’t see anything about this. My apologies if it’s in another thread.

I’m currently looking at some printing plates on eBay from a set that was released in 1990. According to the database the set is pretty basic and doesn’t feature any kind of parallel cards. Obviously they needed a plate to print the card, so I’m wondering how the seller obtained these. It’s pretty fascinating to me and was just curious who was the first card manufacturer to start adding printing plates to packs and what year they started.

Pinnacle was the first one in 1998. Anything before that is either a back door theft or fake.

Stadium Club had them in 1997-98 for the NBA. 

Welcome to the Database! 

I messaged the seller to see how they got them because they have 18 different printing plates up for auction in this specific set. I haven’t heard anything from the seller yet. Like I mentioned I know obviously plates had to be made to produce the cards, and if this set is earlier than when plates were included in packs it’s pretty interesting to me how they were sourced. I don’t think they’re fake, but would love to hear how they acquired them.

There are also plenty of fakes out there as well. There is a recent thread that had a link to an article about that.

If you can provide a link it would be appreciated! 

Collector's Edge started issuing them in 1995 football.  I don't know if they are officially the first, but I don't know of any before them.

The first pack-inserted press plates that I know of are 1997 Pinnacle (Racing).

I have not seen a genuine press plate from earlier than that (unless it was still in full sheet form).  Sorry to say, that includes your Collectors Edge piece, Celticwolfco. I'm assuming of course that you did not over crop the scan significantly.  That plate exhibits one of the easy to see markers of a fake.  It is missing some of the image from every edge, which means the picture is enlarged compared to the actual card.  Another problem I see with it is a bit harder to illustrate, that is the color separation is off.  The blue areas of the picture (like the patriots logo, for example) could not be dark on a magenta plate.

I think the article that Dan referred to is my tutorial posted here.  Hopefully someday I will have enough genuine press plates in my collection to be able to illustrate bad vs. good color separation.

-Tom

Could you clarify.  Cards are 2-1/2" x 3-1/2".  But for full bleed cards (full image on card, no borders) the plates are oversized (larger than 2-1/2" x 3-1/2"). Creating larger cards on the sheets that are trimmed to 2-1/2" x 3-1/2".  Oversized plates have to be trimmed to 2-1/2" x 3-1/2" before they can be inserted in packs.

Or are you saying the image on the card is considered 100% and his plate image is let's say 105% (larger) or 95% (smaller)?  Thus, could not have produced the printed card.

Yes Chuck, I'm assuming that the plate is cut to the same size as a standard card.  The image on a press plate needs to be the same size as what's on the finished card (as in scale, not edge to edge dimensions).  On full bleed cards, the picture starts out dimensionally larger than the finished card, but it is still 1:1 in scale.  If you compare many copies of a full bleed card, you will see differences in the positioning of the cut.  Some examples will show more of the picture at the right edge and have more cut off at the left, or visa-versa.  The image is always the same size, but the 'window' of the cut is positioned slightly diferrently on the image from sheet to sheet.  That's why the picture starts out dimensionally larger, to allow for the variation in cutting position without running out of image.

On the fake plates, however, the person making them is starting out with the image of a card that has already been cut.  In order to cut the 'plate' to the standard card size without showing the original card's edge anywhere in the reproduced image, they either enlarge or stretch the image so that it bigger than the card. When the image is enlarged, some of it gets cut off of every edge, unlike the originals where if one edge is missing a bit of the picture, the opposite edge will show more.

So yes, I'm saying that the image on his plate appears to be 105% scale of the actual card image, thus could not have printed the card.  For that portion of my assessment, I am assuming that the uploaded image of the plate is not overcropped.  An overcropped scan would give the same visual result, however, based on the bad color channel separation I am still confident in my conclusion.

-Tom