What Exactly Happened To This Rhodesia Nyasaland Stamp?

The entire stamp is very blurry and the text looks weird.

This looks like a stamp that has been printed in photogravure. Especially the older multicoloured photogravure stamps suffered from bad registration of the colours. The black printing, at least, is slightly offset to the right, as you can see from the white outlines.

The blurriness, probably, is an optical illusion caused by this colour shift. However, there might be a shift to the left or upward of another colour that adds to the effect.

Does that just mean that during the process of colours being applied, the actual stamp paper got misalligned, resulting in the extremely blurry image and weird looking text? I have other Rhodesia Nyasaland stamps from the same period, and, for example, the head of the Queen is much clearer on those, and they even have the exact same text without this weird effect. I have it marked as an oddity in my book underneath the rest.

There are only two colours, which Stanley Gibbons describes as olive-green and orange-brown. The colour shift is caused by the two inked cylinders being slightly misaligned in relation to each other. It's not unusual.

As for the general blurriness, the whole picture is out of focus, including the perforations, so it's difficult to see if the printing is blurred or not. If it is, the cause is over-inking of one or both cylinders. This is also not unusual.

Colour-shifts and over-inking would have to be quite extreme to interest most collectors.

Um, okay? I was only asking, I am not trying to "interest most collectors", this is my stamp and I am allowed to ask about it, regardless of what "most collectors" think.

A nice example of how colours online do not appear as they are. On my screen the olive-green appears greyish black.

Ellie88. As a member of this community, you can see that we have a variety of volunteers here willing to answer your questions. In this case, as a collector, you asked a generalized question that we have seen before, and you added a picture to help us. That question was:


NSK's answer included color registration and how that registration issue causes the stamp to appear fuzzy.

After you asked for further clarification, pjr's response clarified that there were two different colors, that they were caused by the cylinders being misaligned, then went on into some other thoughts about focus of your scan and how it is difficult to see everything to give you a more detailed analysis. pjr then added a "specialized collectors" comment that essentially said that (in pjr's opinion) most collectors have seen this in their collections but are not interested in noting it as anything special unless the misregistration is extreme.

So, bottom line is that you are encouraged to ask all the questions that you want, but the answers you receive may not be what you want to read, and they may contain more information about issues that you didn't necessarily ask. You may want to just move on to the next question.
Just my thoughts.

NSK: It looks greenish black on my screen. The surprise is that there are only two colours!

Ellie88: I didn't mean to imply that either your stamp or your question is uninteresting, and I don't quite see how you got such an implication from what I wrote.

Because small colour shifts and slight over-inking are an inevitable part of the printing process and hardly noticed as unusual at the time of issue, most collectors consider them unimportant and therefore uninteresting. You and I are at liberty to disagree with them.

@pjr, this is the problem. Each screen shows another colour. Now I know what I am looking for, it becomes greener. Thatis the other issue with online colour recognition. Everyone percieves it differently. This is why the many questions of the type "Is my example the rare canary purple instead of the normal lavender-blue shade?" cannot be answered.

I completely agree it is surprising those are only two colours.

@Ellie88, as technology improves, small variations become rarer and more special. Consider that until around 1960, Harrison had not printed photogravure stamps in more than two colours. Colour shifts were very common even in the 1970s. In the collecting world, they are not considered interesting and maybe distracting, until they become so pronounced that someone's eyes are printed on his shoes.

"Interesting" in philately, often is used to express that something is uncommon.