I have known about them since around 2008. I never got into all the rare versions till around that time. Jon or Jerry would know more than me in that area. I will email both and ask and get back.

I was recently talking to a retired printer and he says real printing presses are becoming obsolete very quickly and what used to be top of the line Hidelbergs now sell for pennies on the dollar.

When did Zerox come out with the iGen?

The earliest anyone remembers noticing them is 2002. Who knows how long before someone noticed them. For several years I tracked every sale of these and almost all come from the some area of the US. If you put a mark in the center all the cards sold in a area of 200 miles from that spot. The sellers would only have one of them.

That's interesting.

Fakes before digital were mostly done the easiest way possible. They just took a regular card and photographed it through filters and a screen.
So things like black borders or other solid areas had a halftone they shouldn't have had. The 63 Rose batch might be an exception but haven't seen one up close since about 84-85.

Doing a proper mask for each color would be a fair amount of work, and hardly anyone making fakes did that.

The mystery card doesn't show that. There are a couple places where it could be called a maybe, like in the logo where the halftones aren't as clear as the original. But the solid areas are solid as expected.

Being within the timeline for digital process free plates complicates things. A digital plate wouldn't require the film, and the skill of someone to make a good mask for each color. And starting from scratch might explain the stuff that an earlier faker would have gotten right. (The mislocated copyright, and the yellow in the cartoon fingers that was never there originally. ) I'm not familair with the earlier process free digital plates, but the loss of detail in areas like the MLBPA logo on the back culd be from that.

Digital would also lend itself more to shorter print runs. *

Of course that still leaves mysteries like why so few were distributed until finding this batch. Maybe the fakers were trying to avoid what sunk the 63 Rose guys, who offered a very popular card in near perfect condition and in bulk!)


* I May have mentioned it before, but the guys I worked with did a very short run fake of a concert ticket. Like 6 pairs of a bob Seeger ticket they sold to scalpers, then bought a ticket a section away to watch the "fun"
I found out because they left the plate for the blue in the scrap plate pile which I used as dustpans.
"Hey! I didn't know we made concert tickets"
"SHHHH! Give me that! I'll explain later. "

So if you worked in a print shop, a really short run was totally possible.