Stamp Value, #182 With Fancy Cancel

I am new here. My wife was given this stamp...research tells me it is a #182, and has a vivid skull & cross bone fancy cancel. Is it of any value ?
Thank you.


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It has value IF the cancel isn't fake. It looks a little too perfect

As eyeonwall mentions, if genuine, it has value. This is one of the more desirable fancy cancels, but also can be faked, so if looking to sell, would garner more demand if certified. If not certified, may still fetch $50-$75 on ebay as a clear and centered strike (which is what brings suspicion).

I am dubious for the same reasons. I also think it would be easy to fake...


I would add that there is also purple/magenta cancel, as shown by splitting out the magenta color channel from the image like this


And lastly, I have never seen a cancel that would have this kind of detail


Adding all of this up, including the fact that the cancel is so well centered AND perfectly vertical makes this virtually unbelievable to my hobbyists eye.
Don

Thank you all for the input. This has been a very learning experience.

While I mostly agree with Don, I am not ready to give up so quickly. First of all, what is the provenance, in other words what are the circumstances under which "My wife was given this stamp"? Did it come from a good collection, or just a $5 find from a stamp dealer's Cinderella box?

My spidey sense also says that it looks fake, but that particular cancel has surprised me in the past. Yes, normally the cancel is very blurred. Here is one that is PF Certified sold by Siegel in 2022.

Now here is another that they sold in 2011 (though not certified, assumed genuine),


This cancel has some surprisingly fine detail for 1880.

Frequently fake cancels are added to used stamps not unused stamps, in other words you often find a beautiful crisp fancy cancel alongside a light smudge of some ordinary cork cancel. Don, what do you mean that "there is also purple/magenta cancel"? Are you looking at the wavy concentric lines behind Ben Franklin? That looks to me more like a moire pattern by the scanner rather than a cancel.

Two other tidbits, the color of the cancel looks more genuine than many sharp black modern rubber stamp cancels I have seen, and the rim of the CDS at the left is a nice touch that I don't usually see on fake cancels. (I hope I am not giving away too many secrets to the fakers). Plus the #182 is the right timeframe for that cancel found on other 1880-1882 stamps.

Interested to hear if John or others agree or disagree that it is worth further investigation.

I second what Zebra says about "a moire pattern by the scanner"

You can clearly see the purple/magenta in the Op image. The fact that splitting the CMYK channel and have the magenta so clearly shown removes ANY doubt that it is there and has nothing to do with any moire scanning artifact.
Don

How can you say that? I have scanned mono-color stamps and had other colors turn up in the scanned image.

Please post your image, it would be great to see it.
Don

RE: Moiré patterns typically appear when scanning printed material and is caused by the presence of a halftone scan target (in other words, scanned item is made up of tiny dots like a magazine image). Unless he scanned a a printed stamp out of a catalog or magazine, I would not think that a US stamp would have any halftones. I have scanned well over 1 million stamps and covers on at least a dozen different scanners and never seen a moiré pattern. We have hundreds of thousands of uploaded images on this forum and I do not recall ever seeing a scan of a stamp that showed a moiré pattern. I assume that it is always possible (especially without knowing much about how the image was generated) but would like to see an example (especially a moiré that does not extend across the entire image) on another Bank Note stamp.
More scans from the OP might help clear this issue up.

In terms of comparing the Coleville cancel to this one, the piece of circular rim is nowhere close to the same orientation in relationship to the skull.


As I said, I remain I remain skeptical. I did not and am not counting anything out, we are all working from an image and without much context.
Don

Perhaps Moire is not the correct technical term. I experienced an odd scanner artifact just this morning when scanning some stamps for another thread here.


Above image scanned at 150dpi, there are some odd patterns across the stamps, especially in the sky behind the Washington Monument. The image below scanned at 300dpi looks fine.


I tried to reproduce this on a 1-cent banknote and didn't get stripes in the image background, but definitely got some new diagonal patterns at the bottom right of the bust.


Above image scanned at 150dpi has diagonal lines at the bottom right of the bust; below image scanned at 300 dpi shows the proper detail and orientation of the engraved lines.


Zoomed in to this area of the solid blue stamp and I see pixels in shades of purple (lavender).


Back to the OP skull & crossbones stamp, I do see the purple circular lines in the solid background behind Franklin, but I don't see that "cancel" carry through past the edges of that solid blue oval, nor do I see the purple on Franklin's head either. And in the zoomed detail image (with the green arrow), I barely see any of the purple lines in that copy of the image.

I appreciate the magenta-filtered image and definitely see the lines there, but am stretching to see it as a cancellation. I don't know what else to describe it as though. Yes, I think a higher resolution scan of the stamp would be ideal, if the OP wooolf would be able.


Edit: added clarification "scanned at 300 dpi" to the second image.

Zebraman,
Interesting, thank you for taking the time and discovery. Engraved stamps (as a scan target) may well be different than other (and more modern) printing types.

Given the OP's image size and stamp size, it was scanned 300 dpi.

I've scanned the same Bank Note stamp at 75, 150, 300, 600 dpi and do not see anything like what is shown above. Did you do anything other than just the scanned dpi to get those results? What scanner did you use?
Don

Don,
The scanner is a Canon MG6220, importing using the plug-in from Preview app on iMac. No changes to the settings between scans other than the DPI. Other settings remained at default:
Kind: Color
Format: JPEG
Image Correction: None
Rotation Angle: 0
Auto Selection: Off.


Edit to add:
I got the same results just now with Photoshop, and also with the standalone scanner app, so it is the scanner and/or driver doing this, not the Preview image editing software. The scanner plug-in window looks substantially identical regardless of which app I use to scan.
I resized the images to be the same size and saved them with the same JPEG settings (but the artifacts were already there in the original raw scans).

Here is an example of 2 mono color stamps that show rainbow.
Both stamps have horizontal lines in the design.
The results vary both by the angle the stamp (ad thus the lines) on the scanner and the scanning resolution.
This image was done at 150 dpi. At 600 dpi the images look normal.

For what it is worth, the cover illustrated above is genuine (that is my very old "$600 price in pencil on the front). I sold it from Steve Albert's collection to a California County Coroner.

In my opinion, from the scan only, the cancel on the loose 1c stamp is genuine as well.