I believe the Xerox printer could only print up to 600 DPI (I say only, that’s still quite high). You can pick up ‘all in one’ home printer/scanner units which can both scan and print in 2,400 DPI these days. If anyone has one of those I’d be really interested to know what the quality is like when doing the following:
- Grab a minty e-Reader card (or at least one which has no damage over the dot code);
- Scan the card at 2,400 DPI;
- Print the scan at 2,400 DPI on glossy paper (disabling any auto-scale the default printer settings may have);
- Scan the printed scan at 2,400 DPI and compare the results.
That should give a like for like copy of the card matching the exact size and at 2,400 DPI should also pick up all of the dot code without any issue (I’d imagine 300 DPI would be enough for this as well, mind you).
Did you mean to say wouldn’t here? From my limited experience of working for a company which had a printing division several years ago, designers and print/press operators tend to stay separate. The designers will be up in an office somewhere and the print/press operators will be in a ground floor warehouse/factory unit possibly even in a completely different location.
TCA Gaming acquired these from a designer, not a print/press operator (although it wouldn’t surprise me if one of those did claim to have been a designer years later). I’d strongly imagine the copies printed by the designer would have been printed on a much smaller-scale and easy to use commercial printer (like the Xerox one mentioned here) rather than having the designs fed through to the same machine which mass-produces Pokémon cards.