Does my post that you're responding to say 'exact match"?
Thank you. This is from a government funded study on shoe print analysis where the task was to match a crime scene shoe print to a manufacturer's shoe pattern, make, year, and etc.:
"Two scenarios encountered by the forensic examiner were addressed: (i) in the investigative phase, to determine the source of an impression given a known set of outsole prints; which is useful in homicides and assaults where there are no known prints to match, and (ii) in the prosecutorial phase, to determine whether a particular impression evidence is from a known suspects shoe with a quantification of similarity and uncertainty.
...
The retrieval ask is to find the closest match to a crime scene print in a local/national database so as to determine footwear brand and model.
...
Identification is based on the physical match of random individual characteristics the shoe has acquired during its life. Evidence provided by a positively identified shoe mark is as strong as the evidence from fingerprints, tool marks, and typewritten impressions [1]."
All such information is indexed into a database so as to be matched against shoe-print evidence. An automatic footwear identification system accepts as input shoe-print evidence and retrieves the most likely matching prints."
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/233981.pdf
The small detail that is really important here is that a crime scene print can be matched to a data base, such as shoe sole pattern database, typewritten marks database, or fingerprint database. The accuracy of matching a shoe print to a shoe pattern data base is really good, as good as a fingerprint database. The accuracy of matching a shoe print to a specific shoe should not be assumed.
Perhaps the Detective Website's quote claiming that a crime scene shoe print can be an exact match an individual shoe is an exaggeration?
I'll look for more studies on shoe print analysis - maybe there is another article that specifically addresses matching a shoe print to a specific shoe. I wonder if that accuracy is measured in probabilities similar to DNA probabilities. DNA is never a 100% match. Even though the probability is so high there is no doubt, can we really say that a shoe print can be a 100% exact match to a specific shoe, but DNA cannot be matched 100%.
Clearly there is conflicting information, so it's not surprising that there are different viewpoints.
Cheers