Movie Posters: reprints vrs first runs (1 Viewer)

[Jay H]

Can anybody enlighten me of the differences between Reprints and the original runs, is there a quality difference? I just got a LoTR: Fellowship poster reprint, the one with the landscape of New Zealand in the background and the party of nine silouhettes on the mountain. Got it from Rick's Movieposters in FL and it kind of looks a bit fuzzy, not like a printing problem but just a little matte kind of finish and not as glossy as some of the other posters I've seen... Should one expect a difference in quality from reprints or if any of you who have the original run of this poster tell me if this is normal?

Thanks!

Jay

P.S. I just finished The Two Towers and now have one more to go!!! Can't wait til Christmas'02 now! :

 

[Derek Miner]

In my experience (and I have a pile of 400 posters sitting about twenty feet away), most reprints of current (90s-present) popular titles are of good quality. Some reprints do suffer from soft imaging, however. I have a poster for The Empire Strikes Back: Special Edition that is supposedly a European issue, and the image is definitely softer, but it also has some extra text along the very bottom, which easily distinguishes it from the original US version. Another reprint area where I see varying quality is reproductions/reprints of foreign posters. Some of those look shoddy. As someone who most often prefers the artwork over the collectibility, I have a number of reprints in my collection that I think look great, though.

The most telling difference is usually that one-sheets for movie theaters these days are printed double-sided, and the reprint versions won't be. But I have seen some officially issued promotional one-sheets that were single-sided.

When you get into older titles, however, reprints vary in quality wildly. This is an area where you see all sorts of cheap reproductions that look like photographs of the poster blown up to full-size (and probably are).