mary ventura said:
I had a yellow box RWS printed in Italy -- it was terrible! Some of the people had big red blotches. I think it was a poor re-print of the version that used the red dot printing, but these weren't dots, they were big blotches. Some of the black lines were actually smeared-looking. I ended up giving it away and I bought another yellow box, the one printed in Switzerland, and it was fine. I later bought the Original R-W, a China printing, and liked it very much. I gave it away, though, because now I've bonded with my PCS Commemorative Centennial edition, and that's the only RWS deck that I use.
Mary V
Looking at my Italy version, it looks like a scan of a scan of a print if that makes sense. Surely this wasn't taken from the original artwork (US Games's 1971 re-colouring of the black and white drawings).
Each time you scan something, there's a slight loss of quality. I think this was scanned from one of the later Belgium printings with the text titles rather than the PCS calligraphy (The fonts have then been re-done for this version). These editions were oversaturated colour wise, which shows on the Italian edition. Add to this the vastly inferior print quality, poor colour matching and lower print definition and this begins to explain the grainy quality of many of the faces.
In places, the repro quality must have been so bad, they've tried to touch it up in photoshop but it's been done in a very slapdash manner. It's as if the time ran out on the deadline and only half the work was done. Some faces and bodies have been re-coloured, others have been left. The Star and the High Priestess are almost perfect yet the Hanged Man, Temperance and the Devil remain grainy and blotchy.
Worse still for me is the flagrant sloppyness that colours three clouds on the World card in a dark grey yet leaves the fourth white. Also, the Ace of Cups -the background has been re-touched but bits have been missed. The rays around the hand have been semi-obliterated. They are still visible between the water streams but have been painted over around the finger tips.
These are just a few examples. There are many more and I can't believe that this edition was ever allowed by US Games. Where was the quality control? If a publisher is going to produce the 'only authorised' edition of such an important deck then surely they have a duty to do better than this. My only hope is that when a chinese printing does appear, they will have re-visited the proof artwork in an attempt to return to the sort of high quality we used to see from them.
To be fair, this has definitely been the case with the Original Rider Waite. I couldn't be more pleased with my Chinese printing of that deck. Restoring PCS's original calligraphy titles to the yellow box edition is probably too much to ask (God know's what was behind the idea of doing away with them in the first place) but 'accurate tone colours' and good print quality would be a start.
Chris. xx