What Color Would This Be Considered?

Also the cancellation is different?


*** Moved by Staff to a more appropriate forum. ***

There is no sure means of identifying colour by looking at images ipona computer or tablet screen. There are many forms of cancellation.

Colors are difficult. If you post a scan (or photo) of this stamp with a couple others of this series with different colors, someone could make some comparative suggestions.

Here are a few. Several are different shades. I believe I read that there are 3 shades of red. Kinda tough
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Here are a few. Several are different shades. I believe I read that there are 3 shades of red. Kinda tough. I have 1 vertical pair and 1 horizontal pair. 3-4 perfins
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Printing ink color were not always consistent resulting in many shades - some of them unusual and/or rare and valuable. Lots of the stamps you show are generally at least 100 years old and the enviroment ( ie light, moisture, and heat ) may have affected them to the degree that the color may have degraded and changed. This is one of the challenges of our hobby. I would highly recommend you get a Scott catalog for basic identification and a Michel specialized Germany catalog for more in depth identification. Michel catalog goes into detail about color variations and is available in an English language version. Also posting large format scans of stamps you have questions about will allow board members to better help you with your questions.

To answer your question about the cancel - you are seeing what is part of what is called a machine cancel. A whole additional facet of our hobby.

Rich

The stamps you show were definitives produced in huge quantities over a span of many years to be the workhorse stamps of their era. Just try to make a couple of billion of something over a span of 10 or 15 years and see if they all come out exactly the same.

I would not get caught up in small color/shade/hue differences - especially with used stamps which have additional handling and environmental aspects.

Also, in larger context, here is a typical machine cancel used in many German cities in this era:

Color, in my view, is the bane of collecting. But only because catalogues assign different numbers and values to the different hues and shades. Otherwise we could simply keep as many as we like, without agonizing over precisely what name each should have.