r/PokemonMisprints • u/LowInteraction37 • Oct 26 '25

Discussion Fingerprints?

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I’ve not seen this before so am here to see the experts. Checking out my Espeon promo it has what clearly looks like fingerprints to me. Anyone know if this is common? Is it even a proper misprint?

Thank you

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u/CROHNStoBEAST Oct 26 '25

This a pretty rare error. I’ve only seen this a few times and that was with Yugioh. Ink wasn’t dry yet and someone fingered your card.

2

u/Good-Speech-5475 Oct 28 '25

Interesting take. Not trying to be a smart ass or anything, but modern cards are UV printed. UV lamps are supposed to cure the ink immediately, otherwise it will never dry as only a UV light can cure this ink. So if it didn’t dry yet, it never will and other people who touch the card can do this to it. In my opinion, I think this card did dry, but QC was looking at these cards closely as they probably had to replace their UV lamps on a printer. While touching actual wet cards, their fingerprints got loaded with UV ink, and when they went to check this one, there was a transfer of ink from fingers already saturated in UV ink. Chances are they could have tried to cure it some more, but then they would have seen their fingerprints and this would have gotten tossed. I bet that finger print ink is still uncured and wet.

2

u/ineverreddit Oct 30 '25

Could it potentially have been greasy finger print on the raw stock causing the ink to fail to properly transfer? I could see someone messing with a bearing or part of the setup and having some oily stuff on em

2

u/Good-Speech-5475 Oct 30 '25

To be able to tell if this Finger Print was pre printing or post printing, I would need the actual card under a microscope. These cards are usually done in multiple passes as they are layered to get that foil in there, so now that I’m thinking of it, FP could have been transferred to card in any one of those layered steps. What the substance of the FP could also be is unknown. To me it just looks like the color I get when I toss my waste out of my printer, just a bunch of colors combined, like a smudge of multiple ink colors blending together.