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Wednesday, 21 October 2015

The Force Awakens Even More With Ultra Violet Light

If you have the Star Wars stamps and don't have an ultra-violet lamp, then you won't be seeing the features on the stamps issued yesterday that are invisible in ordinary light.  As far as I know The Drum is the first to reveal this, which isn't in the publicity information that was sent out by Royal Mail to dealers.

The stamps showing the new characters have a fluorsecent representation of the new Film's logo in yellow:




The earlier characters have different emblems in fluorescent white, some have the Alliance Starbird and others the Imperial Crest, as used on the first day of issue postmarks.  Some of these are quite difficult to see against the very dark colours of the stamp, suggesting that the fluorescent ink may be below some of the colours.



Thus although there are only 4 obvious cylinder numbers, there are actually 7!  Reading upwards:

Black, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Phosphor, White Fluor, Yellow Fluor - all C1

There are no fluorescent marks on the miniature sheet, but the same marks are included on the Generic Sheet, and PSB panes.

UPDATE 7 DECEMBER
My thanks to reader Jarvis, and also to Davis and Alex at Royal Mail Philatelic Enquiries who provided him with this line-drawing of the fluorescent emblems added to the stamps.  The arrangement shows the 12 stamps in the normal sheets.



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4 comments:

  1. Trelantis21 October 2015 at 12:00

    Could this be a new security feature that RM didn't want to publicise?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 1 Stop Stamp Shop22 October 2015 at 09:50

      Unlikely, since they are copyrighted logos. Very odd that they haven't told anyone about it though, especially as its a "first". Perhaps they deliberately wanted it to be an "Easter Egg" along the lines of the secret extras in many DVDs.

      I did notice that there was a logo vaguely visible on the generic smiler stamps when held angled against normal daylight, and it did idly cross my mind that it might be something that might show up under UV/black light, but I forgot to actually check!

      Has anyone looked to see if the flourescent ink has its own cylinder number?

      Delete
  2. spacesurfer1 November 2015 at 10:08

    I agree with the Easter Egg explanation.
    From the Prestige Stamp Book Limited Edition description on Royal Mail website:
    "Packaged with a premium quality, high end Ultra Violet torch, complete with batteries - perfect for viewing the Ultraviolet designs on the Character Stamps!"

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous1 November 2015 at 16:39

    Iis there any chance we shall see illustrations of the representations from Royal Mail?

    ReplyDelete

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