[roywiggins]

Reproductions are awesome as aids to study and for education, no question. Scan everything and make it available in virtual & physical museums! There are huge gains from that. A faithful reproduction of an ancient Egyptian coffin lid is probably nearly as good, from an educational point of view, as the real thing.

But you're not going to be able to take that reproduction coffin lid, put it in a CAT scan, and find a 3000-year-old fingerprint.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/three-thousand-yea...

[dogma1138]

Of course not but there are other good uses for reproduction and that if they are good enough you can gain insight from actually touching and handling them. Humans gain quite a bit of information from touching things, the lack of touch is actually felt in some fields like astronomy that have now started to experiment with 3D printing staler objects based on observational data and mathematical models to gain additional insight into various objects.

"The success of our work and easy identification of previously unrecognized physical features highlight the important role 3D printing and interactive graphics can play in the visualization and understanding of complex 3D time-dependent numerical simulations of astrophysical phenomena."

http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.00716

And while you won't be getting any fingerprints or trace material of a reproduction sarcophagus more people could see it, be inspired and you can actually use them in touch exhibits which open a whole other world for allot of people including the blind.