Hong Kong: QEII 1992 definitives

This is a postmark refined selection of unsorted definitives of the whole series. I have made no attempt to distinguish between the issues (Photo and Litho), as I want to retain the will to live. One day I'll have to bite the bullet and sort them. In the meantime, I'll just look out for the less common values that have CDS postmarks.

This selection is probably a reasonable representation of the availability of the various values.

Based on my Michel China, it does look challenging.
I only dabbled in early China

I did however at one time seriously collect Brazil.
They put out a set of some 15 identical stamps  20 times over a period and each one had a different watermark that was only partly visible on any given stamp.
To make matters worse they did one with no watermark - after some 5-10 years of trying to figure it out that no watermark series ended up being my biggest pile.

Do you have a good way of checking this?  I don't have my stamps sorted well enough to make it easy to look for my stamps from this set, but I dug through the Hong Kong pile long enough to find about 15 copies or so, thinking that would be enough to make sure I had some of each printing type.  I thought the difference would be something simple to spot, like a visible dot mesh for photogravure and a solid background for lithography, but that wasn't the case (unless all of the stamps I found were in fact photogravure) as all of them had dot meshes visible.  Quick glances through Scott & Michel didn't help much, and Yang didn't help at all!

Ryan

I have around 80 grams of off-paper used stamps in the Hong Kong tin, so that's a bit north of 1000 stamps.  I just picked a little through the pile a bit until I found a few - there are more in there, and will be more added as I continue to soak my way through my mountains of stuff, so I'll eventually get a better look at these.  As it was, I had a look at the ones I picked out, particularly at the "O"s in "Hong Kong".  The dot pattern was prominent around the edges on all of them so I just put them back in the tin and called it "inconclusive" (I never thought to have a look at them with my UV light).  The photo / litho comparison has been fairly straightforward on some other common issues so I kind of expected the same thing with these Hong Kong issues.  It may yet turn out to be easy to see a difference, and it's just waiting for me to come across some litho copies.

Ryan

I know Rein peripherally dating back to my days in rec.collecting.stamps.discuss on USENET back before the turn of the century - he's very knowledgeable and has particular interests in stamp production minutiae.  Somewhere buried in my piles of literature I have a booklet he wrote on Belgian stamps.

The difference he cites between EME and photogravure (note he states "traditional photogravure") have to do with the methods used to create the printing plates.  Traditional photogravure is a strictly mechanical process using chemicals and has existed since the 19th century.  The process is at its most basic sort of like what hobby photographers will go through to develop their own film except there are quite a few more steps (and you can see what you're doing for much of it).  See the Wikipedia article on photogravure.

Electromechanical engraving is a modern process which uses a computer to engrave the plate, controlling a stylus that digs little holes - there is also a method using a computer to control a laser which burns holes into the plate (which I suppose would be essentially indistinguishable from EME but shouldn't really be called "electromechanical" because it's missing the "mechanical" part).  Here are a pair of brief marketing videos from a printing company that uses such processes.

 

The printing process is then essentially the same as for traditional photogravure, as far as how the plates are inked and the paper printed.  The differences are in the production of the plates.  I will save your link to that Stampboards thread and look forward to investigating the screen angles in the future - I like that kind of fussy flyspecking stuff.

Ryan

I've just found amongst some recently acquired coil strips, examples of 'blued' gum. Here's a strip with a normal for comparison; both showing different coil number fonts. I've found the blueing on values: 10c, 50c, $1.50, $2.10 and $2.60 but this may occur on others as well:

Now this is what I enjoy!  Nothing a nostalgic, information junkie likes better than a post which features a historically significant item, a view of distant climes with retro ties, and a personal reflection on the author's association with (and reminiscences concerning)  the subject of the item.  I have never been to Hong Kong but nonetheless enjoyed my travels this day.   Thanks, Anping!

Here's a more extensive range of used definitives, which I forgot about. These are only in value order and I've not checked these for phosphor banding (tagging), nor printing type:

The second FDC dated June 1, 1995 and another 4 new denominations for the 1992 definitives.