montecarlojoe wrote:gsm stands for grams per square metre - so the higher the gsm the higher the density of the paper stock. So you'd expect 330gsm to be fairly stiff and heavy (for paper).
Calling it casino stock will speak of the quality of the paper - if it's going out to casinos you'd expect high durability and consistency of density and colour.
Exactly, for reference/comparisons: the MPC standard "high quality" paper, which actually is quite improved from what they used to sell, is 300gsm (grams per square meter) smooth or 310gsm linen. It compares directly to Bicycle brand stock now. Higher quality papers, such as the 330gsm paper Lotrek used is hard to find, but I have found one source for a 350gsm smooth bond that I will likely use for the Chromografix decks that really requires a very high gloss, high brightness paper to be effective with those ultra high resolution photographic images and 16M colors instead of 3025 shades, which is what CYMK + 1 spot (or metallic ink) gives now.
Typical old school decks are 4-color, but with modern tech that becomes 256 shades. Going to 5-color (easily done, and available now) give 3025 - but that's actually 16 shades or 50000 total 'apparent' colors, just like you can get 256 * 16 or 4096 shades of apparent color using 4-color. Old school printing didn't do that 16 shades per color, and frankly they didn't do much in the way of combinations, which is why the older decks or in general just plain 4 colors.
There is middle ground: Pantone has a 'truecolor' hexagraphic format that adds Green and Orange to CYMK giving CYMKGO for the primary colors and that's usable now, even though I haven't found the routines to do separations, I'm certain that they exist. When you submit files to print, the AI (Adobe Illustator) files are in full color, and the factory does the separations using software. The same would apply to this 6-color format and adding one spot color or metallic ink would require an 8 station press.
The basic Chromografix decks will have 750,000 colors minimum and likely be 16M+ faces, with backs still 50,000 shades. Those are 8-color plus 16 shades each. I already have spec'd out a Chromografix+ using 10-color that would be 10,000,000,000 and that's just crazy, but do-able, although I can't see any reason to do it. Adding 16 shades gives you 160 trillion color shades, and that's unrealistic because there are only Trying to look at the 12-color numbers is insane, giving 106,993,205,379,072 + 16 shades is 1,711,891,286,065,152 (yeah, 1.7 quintillion shades). Just not even reasonable since even using digital presses with the effective 1600dpi is 2.56 million dots per square inch and a sheet of 56 cards each with approximately 7 sq in per is total of 392 sq in printable, yielding a usable array of only 1,003,520,000 or slightly over 1 billion 'dots' effective on the entire uncut sheet. That means anything beyond 8-color is a waste, because you can't possibly print that many different colors on a single uncut even with the Chromografix+ 10-color process. That 8-color process is do-able, reasonable and sane. Anything more is just overkill - for now. If anyone can find me a digital press with effective 2000dpi+ - then we'll revisit those numbers. The fact is digital presses don't HAVE a DPI actually, that's why I keep saying 'equivalent' for resolution.
At 1600dpi effective (again, for reference, everything until a year ago mostly was 400dpi, now we're seeing some 600dpi equivalent) and these at 1600dpi equivalent are already pushing that to 16 times as much resolution as we were getting until no more than 2 years ago. Frankly, 1000dpi or 1200dpi equivalent seems reasonable to me. The first gives you an effective 7 million dots per card, the latter 10.8 million. I think that's pretty good!
Just being honest I think even the basic Chromografix specs are overkill, and would be very happy to do a 7-color + 1 (spot or metallic ink) at 1200dpi effective to start. You still get the same numbers, but you allow for metallic inks or the addition of a single spot color to make that single shade 'pop' on the cards. Either methodology would require you to reconfigure the standard 6-station Heidelberg press (digital versions - metric-specific extensions exist, but it can be done with analog press) into a 9-station press. Fortunately the recently manufactured ones are modular instead of one giant monolithic beast.
But if someone can explain, I'd be interested to know. 
It will definitely be the pinnacle of my collection.
