Halftones are simply the picture being done with dots. The original art is photographed through a "screen" that breaks the image up into the dots. A black and white newspaper photo is the simplest halftone to find. Nearly all modern cards are printed that way. (maybe all, but there's always that one that was done differently) Even back to 1909-10 there's a lot of halftones used.
Generally to make sure the colors mix properly, each color is done at a different angle. (For Straight CMYK, T206 uses some solid colors some halftones and lots of colors. Printing of that era can often be mixed styles)
One of the tells of many fakes is that while Topps prints some stuff like borders and team/name banners in solid colors most fakers take the halftone from an original card and print those areas as halftones.
Steve B
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