Color Guide For Scott

This question will never be answered .

for over a 100 years , it was the kid or should say the 15 year old junior pressman who filled the ink tank on the printing press who decided what color. If he didn't clean the tank out completely of brown ink and was told to get dark green ink and just mix that in, with the approved dark green after the senior pressman approved the bottle .then we get a different shade of dark green .

Then we get the crazy Australian's who tell me they got 300 shades of green and red early Australian stamps when my eyes can only see 15 shades of red or 15 shades of green . They tell the philatelic community ,that they cleaned out the ink tank 300 times perfectly cleaned and then filled it 300 times to get that many shades . Someone needs a slap on the side of their head .

Collectors can make serious money by soaking stamps in water with different amounts of bleach, soap; Ajax with blue cystals in it, and other chemicals to help them retire early selling various shades of ink to other collectors .


If you really want to get into this subject of ink with me . You have to start with showing me the catalog from Germany from pre-WWI ,because almost all or most ink came from Germany .

Remember too --That Philip Ferrary got into a fight with the Paris, France Philatelic Community over shade difference he was finding and the fight got heated ,lucky he was a boxer , so I will need to up grade my Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu before we discuss this issue .

Unless Scott updated all its colours in the late 1950s / early 1960s Pantone did not exist to name the colours for older stamps.

My color guide I made up for myself. I have not made a list of pantone to Scott's color comparision. If you like I can do that and list it here or upon request. I would say more likely by request as it would be several pages. I try and do that if you think it would help. Please keep in mind this is my opinion with help from others to the color we used. This may give you a good starting point in identifying the color. I start on the list and when completed. I will post it's completion and send the list by email PDF to any SCF member requesting it free of charge.

The color chart I made up for myself is just that my opinion. This may help those wishing to identifying Scott's color using a pantone key. I would ask that if anyone has improvements on it. That they list the suggested improvement to all of us.

Hi Uknjay, I would like a copy of your color guide. I will gladly pay for shipping. Please let me know at your convenience

This sounds interesting.

I would like to add that there are two books from PSE, The Philatelic Book Of Secrets, Vol. 1 and 2, and for some stamps they give the Pantone numbers. I don't write this to recommend it though as the Pantone colors were not helpful for me at all. My guess is there are not enough Pantone colors :). But I wanted to have mentioned the books.

And one thing in addition is that Pantone colors can be for coated and uncoated paper, and stamps are somewhat sometimes more appearing like coated and sometimes more like uncoated paper (independent if they are actually coated). But this can be a difference.

floortrader,
I have no inclination to go toe-to-toe with you regarding colors. Between color variations, quality control, environmental factors and downright subterfuge, there is no way all these colors can be quantified definitively. My goal is to be able to observe a difference between Pantone samples so as to have a better understanding of what kind of hue, value or chroma variance I'm looking for between stamps. Is this a futile effort? Probably. But like a dog with a bone, I just can't seem to let go of it. I can thank the large banknote postage dues for pulling me down this rabbit hole.

Uknjay,
I would love to get a copy of your list. I have a small list already (compiled from PSE's books) and would be interested in expanding it and comparing your list to mine. I'm considering making a cross-reference of Pantone colors with the Munsell colors given in R.H. White's Encyclopedia of the Colors of United States Postage Stamps by directly matching the Pantone colors directly to Munsell samples. There are 483 unique colors between the four volumes. I've already experimented with converting the Munsell values to Pantone, but it requires several conversions to other systems. (sRGB, XYZ, and others.) It's no exact science, and I've had some success but it hasn't been consistent enough.

littbarski,
There is a Volume #3 with some Pantone color information, as well. In fact, Volume #3 has even more than the first two volumes combined! Last I knew, PSE still had it for sale. Just give them a call. Incidentally, you should use the uncoated Pantone colors as the coated is darker. And the coating is in relation to the paper, not the colorant. The reason the coated paper is darker is it absorbs less of the ink.

Behr or Sherwin-Williams would be just as useful.

The question of color keys/guides/gauges and which one is the best to use, or where one can be purchased comes up as often as (What Washington is this?) or (What stamp is this?) or (What is this worth?). This one of the most common topics comes up as often as buying eggs or gas/petrol etc... Not only on this forum but several others and strangely enough I responded to a post on Stamporama that has turned out eerily similar to this one.

Unfortunately that answer will never be a straight answer to that question. I too have asked the question which one do I use? The only straight forward conclusion I can come up with is. Get as many as your'e willing to get and you can afford without going bankrupt doing so. Then there is free or almost free. The internet is a great tool and the Stamp Smarter site is by far in my opinion the best. But it is not without limitations as many of us found out recently when part of it when down. Besides the answers are always a mixed bag of opinionated, subjective, responses especially here in the keyboard commando world. Then it becomes questions that one has to ask themselves.

1) What country do I live in? Why is this important many of you may be asking? For example here in the United States the most common guide that most of us to Identify colors, types and catalog # is of course Scott. Harris USBNA, Brookman, and many other philatelic names use Scott as the benchmark to go by.
Then of course there is Stanley Gibbons that is used primarily by the UK and many other places in the world. Lets not forget Michel which is used other countries in the world, I am sure that I am missing some others but the point is there is not one singular answer to the OP's question.

2) How much or are you willing to spend on such scientific devices based upon opinion and conjecture to support the hobby? Only we as individuals can answer that question honestly. I for one will spend as much as my wallet allows me to.

3) Then we are faced with many problems of acquisition of the devices that are many times out of production/print. Such as the Scott Specialized Color Guide for U.S. Stamps. They reality is this will only get you close when you are trying to identify used stamps. I like many others here are fortunate enough to posses one.
If I am correct Scott hasn't printed them in quite sometime. The market supports this. I have seen one listed on eBay to the tune of $5,000 dollars. That is crazy if you ask me.

So what are we to do? There are as many answers to that question as there are catalogs and color guides. Many of those answers one has to remember when asking are opinions filled with superlative terms like the best.

My opinion is to use more than one source to find your information and keep on collecting. I use the rule of 3 sources if there is something I am trying to identify then taking the closest 2 of the 3 and split the difference.

Then there are those of us who use stamps that are known to be the color issued by the postal services as the base line to ID those hard to ID stamps which works great for unused stamps. But is a different story for used stamps especially those stamps that are over 100 years old. Additionally everyone sees colors differently that my friends is a cold hard fact.

Jeremy