Acquiring the image, processing it and printing it at the same quality without distortion, pixelation or other manipulation is the REALLY difficult part. No printer can do that perfectly and cheapy.. it's super expensive and extremely difficult to do. It's not worth it at $30k.. or even $100.
I agree on it, the acquisition and the processing are surely harder than the printig itself (that's why I wrote my post. The idea I got from reading yours was that people could not access to offset printing and would be forced to go for digital).
As for being worth for $30k I'm pretty sure it would be if you have the right connections.
Feel free to believe me or not, but before landing in the videogame industry I've had the following working experience during my college days:
1 - banks and hospitals archives management company (scannerization and indicization)
2 - advertising agency
In the first one, which was quite a few years ago, I've seen and used daily scanners worth well more than $40k. Those machines would acquire with no distortion at all, extremely high fidelity colors and pointless to say, huge magnification. They were even able to perfectly acquire x ray results, which for the period was really hard to achieve in the proper way. I believe today the quality of high-end scanners has surely improved.
Anyway at the time, during off-work, I was free to use those machines if I needed to scan a few personal documents. Today I still have some friends working there, and the possibility of having access to the scanners (now even newer) through them is still open.
During the second experience, I've seen how some people, given the adeguate amount of time, a powerful PC and a large enough file, can do basically everything with a digital document. We all see and laugh at those photoshop disasters on the internet website, but for eveyone of them, there are hundreds of well done jobs.
So recently, during the pursuit of high quality inserts for my MVS only titles, I was quoted 2.000/2.500 euro for a clean up of an high quality scan of an MVS flyer. I can't tell how the file would have really been at the end of the treatment since I did not went ahead due to the cost, but I was assured that it would be like the original and ready to be perfectly printed with professional offset machines. The person that was going to do the job is a professional comics colorist, and without going into details, the process would require a clean off/refill of the printing process (such as all the empty areas in the rosettas) and then a full recolorization. I know very well that this is
a lot of work, but in those days of sinking economy every penny is a treasure (and you all know how incredibly low are the salaries for those that work in the manga/comics industry). Maybe the final art would not be exactly as the original due to the recolorization, but at least there would be no sign of previous scannerization.
Anyway if we go back again to the AF3 topic, with no disrespect to anyone involved, in my opinion the only way to verify if the game was ever produced or not is through SNK-Playmore databases and glossary. Considering that IPs are the most important asset of every videogame company, even a messy one such as SNK will have this information stored.
Back to the TTF and NA topic, it would be nice to know what other games were falsified. Has Twinkle ever been done? Considering that the majority of the insert is white, it would simplify things (although the art quality on the origina front of the insert is already lower than other titles)
