Canadian Philately - The Stamps and Postal History of Canada 1851 to Present by Brixton Chrome

Today, I will start my discussion of the final, physical characteristic of the stamps from this issue: the plate characteristics and flaws. Today's post will be an overview of the different plate characteristics and flaws, followed by a detailed discussion of plate characteristics. Then I will deal with the specifics of plate flaws in more detail through some additional posts over the next few weeks. At the broadest level there are three aspects of interest: plate characteristics, freaks and plate flaws. Plate characteristics are those properties of the printing itself that are intentional and by design. They are, consequently generally present on every stamp in the print run, and distinguish one printing from another, or one group of printings from another. Plate flaws on the other hand are anomalies in the stamp design that occur on a limited number of stamps in each sheet. Those which occur randomly in the printing are dubbed "non-constant", while those that occur o...