I have noticed this texture difference on several chips in the past couple years. I believe that I read somewhere, maybe from Janice, that a large
sheet of paper is used that is not the same printed background all over.
Some inlays will be from the highly textured paper and there will be many
variations.

I first noticed this on the 1996 Harvey's, LT, $1 chips. Look in TCR-6, p. 97.
We listed N8562--LG Waffles & N8563--SM Waffles. This refers to the
waffle-like texture of the inlay background. Hope this helps, Larry, and
thanks for your post. The question now, is do we need to list the different
backgrounds as separate codes. We have stopped doing it as there are multiple
variations on these.