Ever year, though not every issue, we report different types of error on Prestige Stamp Books: missing panes, duplicate panes, inverted pane, perforation errors, miscuts, and so on.
But we've never had anything quite like the one in the image that was sent to me today.
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| Churchill PSB definitive pane on Tallents House FDC - with duplicated datamatrix code! |
My thanks to IG for sharing this with us all. It's an amazing error - and of course there must be more because however these are printed, in whatever sheet or reel format (probably the latter as it is especially for automatic addition to Royal Mail first day covers) - each of the stamps should have a unique datamatrix code. The two codes on each stamp are indeed different.
If anyone else has received a similar error, it will be very interesting to know just how many we can record.
It's also reported that 1st class Xmas counter stamps have been found with a datamatrix code appropriate to 2nd class, so RM and their printers aren't having a good month!
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ReplyDeleteThe danger is that a sender may innocently use of one of these stamps, and then the recipient may be charged because the system will detect that the datamatrix code is a duplicate of a stamp that has already been used.
ReplyDeleteAlan - this will certainly not happen because, firstly, these barcoded stamps were used on an official FDC and these will not be available for another purpose; and secondly, there cannot be another barcoded stamp with an identical barcode, because each printing of the barcode has a different BIN (barcode item number) - it is numbered consecutively!
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