This page is dedicated to the 1859 10 cent Prince Consort issue.  There were 26 printing orders, and most orders required more than one batch of ink.  The range of shades for this stamp is incredible.  If you put 20 of them at random on a table they would all be easily distinguishable as different.  The image below is a shade reference.  It is a collage of scans taken by an Epson Perfection V850 Pro, which is very accurate for colour.  If you wish to compare a stamp of your own, I recommend scanning it with an Epson Perfection scanner (any model should do) using the default colour profiles, and pull it up on your screen along side the image below to find a match.

This has been a project of roughly 15 years, accumulating dated stamps, and excluding the ones which appear faded or on toned paper. The majority on display here are off cover, however I also have a collection of covers which include the majority of the printing orders for comparison.

Only the basic perforation groupings of 11.75x11.75 (orders 1-9), 12.0x11.75 (orders 10-17), and 12.0x12.0 (orders 18-26) were used. Richard Thompson takes perforation study to a whole new level, which could also be applied here.

The classifications are based on the details in Whitworth's book, and also with help from Richard Thompson's exhibit on the First Decimal Issue of Canada which includes colour descriptions beside the images. While my belief is that the classifications displayed here are reasonably accurate, for certain there are mistakes. Your feedback is appreciated.

Click on the link below to download a 1200 DPI high resolution scan. This will allow you to open the image in a photo editor of your choice for a closer comparison with a scan of your own stamp. WARNING: the download size is huge at roughly 60 MBytes.