Flaminica
It's interesting and timely that you make this comparison. I recently exhumed my Victoria Regina which I bought ten or fifteen years ago. I never bonded with the deck at the time and I wanted to give it a second chance.
Now I'm not a collector and up to now I've never paid too much attention to things like print quality or colour separation. I think Aeclectic has educated me. *grins* But on second inspection I was shocked at how poor the printing of this deck is. A greyscale engraving-based deck really needs clean, sharp, strong blacks to make it pop but the ink in my VR is washed out and grey, as if the ink was watered down. The anemic inking isn't even consistent from card to card. Some cards are noticeably darker then others. This jumps out dramatically if you read with them.
As large as the cards are, they're still not large enough for the amount of detail in some of the collages. It's not just that the detail is hard to see - the detail is missing altogether, reduced to meaningless clumps of ink splotches. The Wheel of Fortune is probably the best (worst?) example of this. If the new Chinese printing is on smaller cards I can't imagine how many of the busier designs will look like anything but a muddy mess.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Maybe I want to de-enable folks from spending $60-80 on a deck that will disappoint. Alternatively, perhaps the smaller size will smooth out and disguise the flaws in the art, of which there are many. I'd be very interested in seeing some comparative scans.
Now I'm not a collector and up to now I've never paid too much attention to things like print quality or colour separation. I think Aeclectic has educated me. *grins* But on second inspection I was shocked at how poor the printing of this deck is. A greyscale engraving-based deck really needs clean, sharp, strong blacks to make it pop but the ink in my VR is washed out and grey, as if the ink was watered down. The anemic inking isn't even consistent from card to card. Some cards are noticeably darker then others. This jumps out dramatically if you read with them.
As large as the cards are, they're still not large enough for the amount of detail in some of the collages. It's not just that the detail is hard to see - the detail is missing altogether, reduced to meaningless clumps of ink splotches. The Wheel of Fortune is probably the best (worst?) example of this. If the new Chinese printing is on smaller cards I can't imagine how many of the busier designs will look like anything but a muddy mess.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Maybe I want to de-enable folks from spending $60-80 on a deck that will disappoint. Alternatively, perhaps the smaller size will smooth out and disguise the flaws in the art, of which there are many. I'd be very interested in seeing some comparative scans.
But I can see how it would affect the smaller cards of the Chinese printing. 
How did you score it??