What Was In Your Mailbox Today??

Working on the Commonwealth KGVI pictorials, these really show off the engravers art.

British Honduras

Stallzer, I've never looked very closely at many of the commonwealth issues but these are absolutely beautiful. Thank you for sharing them!

Thank you very much for the kind words. I find these pictorials very attractive, kind of addicted to them :)

Here is a set I acquired in an auction lot the other day.

St Helena 1938 - 1940 Badge of the colony.

Also in the same lot.

The 1940 Badge of the colony set, center in black.

"Now, I only wish I had a scanner like yours"
"I use the Canon Lide 220, $70 on Amazon."

The scanner has little or nothing to do with the quality that comes out.
There are 2 optical systems in scanners that do make a difference but in the end it is:

Scanning & rendering software - generally NOT what comes with the scanner.
Operator's ability to set scanner and controls to render accurate pictures

There is no excuse for most of the blurry washed out pictures that show up on forums and ebay type sites, anybody with any reasonably modern scanner (a dedicated type NOT the junk 3in1), proper software and some acquired proficiency can reproduce the images shown above.

A few older St Helema




and Br. Honduras


The last image in the previous post download and processed through my scanner software.

My previous scanner was an HP 3 in 1 C5180. I scan all stamps for the most part @12oo dpi. With the HP I used their software and I use scan gear which is Canon's canned software. The only visible difference in the specifications between the C5180 and the Lide 220 is the grayscale spec. THe Canon has 16 bit input and the HP 8 bit input. How does this affect the scans? No clue but I see a difference. I have not "tweaked" any settings on either and use the automatic features.

HP




Canon

The first in a concerted push to complete (within my budget) my US commemoratives.

I received my first philatelic Christmas card today:

Walkman82 - Now that's a nice Xmas card!

I hope someone sends me Christmas cards like that :)

I took delivery on several Rasdale auction lots today - mostly British area small collections and (so they claim) mostly MNH complete sets. I'm looking forward to chipping away at those.
Dan

Today I got a couple of postcards from ebay, dating from 1939 and 1941 and mailed from Japan to an Esperantist named Kovàcs Gusztàv in Budapest. The writers of both postcards were obviously aware that s-ro Kovàcs was learning Japanese, since both cards feature a mixture of Esperanto and Japanese. On both cards, the Japanese is written very carefully and clearly for the foreigner's benefit, preferring the simpler katakana syllabary to the more difficult kanji (Chinese characters). When kanji are used, they're either the more common ones learned early on, or supplied with furigana (small syllabic characters used to indicate pronunciation).

I got confirmation that my Dad got his philatelic shipments (Christmas gifts) - a UV lamp and a 10x magnifier.

Hong Kong 1946 Peace / Victory issue.