White spots before your eyes. Distinguishing the new 50p and £1.

 

You will see straightaway that the QR codes on the Prestige book stamps are quite different from the sheets issues. For a moment, I thought this would enable us to distinguish one from the other. But no, of course, as each individual stamp will have a different QR code and that will not help after all!

I suppose it is feasible that part of the design might remain constant to reflect the common source but I would need someone to advise me on that one. There will be something in the long string of characters that will be produced but identifying that amongst the mass of white squares is not something I am going to attempt without guidance!

The slight difference in size of the issues here is purely down to my inconsistent cropping of the later images. Apologies. The colour difference should also be ignored.

 

Update 16 June 2022

I am grateful to Lew Paterson for looking at the QR codes for these (and some other) issues. Here are his findings.

The 4 codes for these illustrations are:

JGB S19981017031001847760010025012201 F6B51D5D00FE2D5801

JGB S19941017031004573840010012012201 7A2413CCC098BDEB01

JGB S19981017031000997760005024012201 53FAA4B2899ACD6801

JGB S19941017031005321590005011012201 D1E0328AE6EDE24501


Possibly the first of each pair, has S1998 while the second has S1994 - could these be different source codes? Yep, just tried my own - S1998 is the Prestige sheet while S1994 is the counter sheets

Looking further, the counter, Book of 8, book of 4 and business stamps use S11 for normal stamps and S12 for large stamps with the last 2 digits in the 20s for 2nd class and in the 10s for 1st class.

First and last prestige book panes

I wondered out loud what might appear in Prestige books and here we have one. The Unsung Heroes Women Of World War II has what may be the face of panes to come.

Just five of the new style definitives with a slightly incongruous looking label. Now I am sure that the label is the same size as the stamps but it looks odd to me. Maybe the need for a label has gone, now that the pane is self-adhesive and not a sort of miniature sheet like we have had in the past.

The stamps are just two denominations, reducing the excitement still further - the 50p and £1 in what appears to be a pretty similar colour to the stamps we've seen already. Clearly, or maybe I should not say clearly as it is not at all clear without a QR code reader, the chunk of code on the right will distinguish these as issues from the Prestige Book but that would seem to be all.

Whereas the normal Machins of old had the MPIL part of the code after the year element M21L or whatever, these stamps have only M22L. MAIL appears to remain as MAIL across the stamps as far as I can see.

It is a little curious and could make used examples difficult to identify. Having said that, just how many used examples of these particular 50p and £1 stamps do we seriously think we will ever see? Apart from those that dealers post to themselves, my guess is zero. So let's not worry about that. 'Used Machins' is a subject for another day when I have a spare few hours to type and you have a spare few minutes to read.

I have not studied these in great depth and maybe we'll discover some difference in printing as I suspect that these come from Cartor and the others are from Walsall. I don't wish to offend the good folk at Cartor but, so far, I have found their end products rather lower in quality and impression than brothers Walsall and the masterful De La Rue, of whom we hear little nowadays. These seem rather better than previous ware - as I said, I cannot quickly detect a difference but I expect it will be a quality or finish matter that does distinguish these.

Presumably the last Machin pane in traditional style is, suitably, contained in the Platinum Jubilee Prestige book. This emerged in February but I forgot to write about it then.

Here we have some repeats in a 2p, 10p and 50p with M21L MPIL codes but a new £1.50 with this code. Indeed, this is the first time a £1.50 stamp has appeared in anything other than a sheet. It looks quite a bright issue to me and that might distinguish stamps from this pane from others if you encounter singles.