Plate faults

As already said, the plate and cliché production system, as well as the same printing methodology, was not the same as the one common today: it was much more "crude", coarse and approximate. This falls back on the final product leaving marks more or less evident. On the other side these marks provide a big help to rebuild the plates, to track their evolution and the position of the various pieces on the plate itself.
The alloys used to prepare the plates, the fusion and duplication methods and the wearing of the composition did originate faults of various types on the stamps, both occasional as well as repetitive.
Faults more or less evident are present as number and different types on all the Old Italian States stamps.
The "production" of the Roman States has defects too: in fact it's a real huge collection of faulty samples.
By looking in details to the Papal stamps, it's immediately evident how bad has been the outcome: smeared borders, small breaks, deformed letters, imprecise drawings, discontinuities of the ornaments, are very common to the point that it's impossible to list them all. If somebody has the opportunity to observe a complete sheet of any one of the values of the Roman States immediately would notice that all the pieces are different one from the other by a lot of many small details and that no one is really perfect!
It's not in the aim of these few rows to deal with all the details. More simply I list, in the three tables here below, the most recurrent evident faults (usually in the catalogues) and the image of some of them by using the already saw Java applet that allows for the visualization of the selected piece.

The below Java applet allows for the choice of which piece to visualize out of the list to the left.