Don't Lithographers Care About Colour Shifting...???

Hi guys

Looking through my stamps and came across a Scott # 506 (plate block) and saw a colour shift.

First picture is a normal scan, but the second picture I enhanced to show the extreme colour shift.

If I was a lithographer ( Which I trained for and did for a couple of years), I would check for any colour shift and halt the presses till we got the colour back where it should be.

Am I nit picking about who is hired and prints for Canada Post...???

My contributionfor the subject is a NZ stamp which always made me wonder the same thing.....

I do not think you are nit picking. You are talking Quality Control and that is for some individuals not an easy subject.

Most people,unless they are trained, worked in that specific area or being brought up with certain values, most people do not care. But there are still the ones who do care. Yesterday I was at the super market, and yes, I was buying beer. One guy, with a baby stroller parked in the isle was straightening up all the beer boxes in the same direction, labels in readable places, simple correcting
all the storing errors, making it look nice.

I ask him what he was doing. He told me he was a beer truck delivery person and his wife was buying groceries and he came back here to check out the beer isle. He told me it upsets him to see things in a mess. Wow.

The printer of these stamps did not care...why? who knows...

Life is not only an attitude, life is a commitment. Easier said then done.

First of all I don't think that's really a major nor uncommon
example of a colour shift for stamps printed at that time.

Like it's been mentioned over and over on these threads it happened
constantly when two or more plates were required.
Less so now mainly due to computerization of the newer presses.

Actually when comparing these Canadian Bank Note and
British American Bank Note stamps of the sixties and seventies with lets say some of the
multicolour combination printings of the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing,
the 2 Canadian companies had better quality control.

And lets not forget that the primary purpose of stamps is to prepay postage, not to please collectors.
At least it was in 1970.

Therefore neither Canada Post nor the printer basically gave a damn whether the colours registered or not.

It still happens today. I have found recent US issues with color mis-registrations, too. The interesting thing is while collectors may find them interesting and a "conversation piece" surprisingly unless there is a significant color shift or color missing from the stamp, they are classified merely as "freaks" by most collectors and are given only a modest premium value, if that. Some purist collectors would even call them "faulty" stamps and put a lower value on them than a perfectly printed example.

They are indeed fun to identify and collect; however, it should be nothing that you would expect to get rich over.

Yikes Seahorse...Looks like a little kid painted it, doesn't it...??

lithograving, you are correct about people who don't care, and a lot of stamp collectors really ignore the colour shifting, BUT I bet if they went into a golf store to buy golf balls, they would expect every one of them to be round.