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Posted By: Jay Miller

Very interesting thread. I've thought about this issue too and I have a slightly different take. While it would be useful to have a set of grades for photographic cards I believe grading companies would be reluctant to do this because this would compromise their registry set calculations which rely on one grade per card. If I might I would like to suggest a different solution which I think incorporates what has been suggested so far. Going forward each cards grade would be a function of either two or three numbers depending if it were a photographic card or not. The numbers would be a front grade, a back grade and a photo clarity grade(if photographic). The card's aggregate grade would be a weighted average of the three. The weighting factors would differ from series to series and would be stored in the grading company computer. The grader would simply grade the factors for the particular card, type these resulting grades into the computer, and then have the card's aggregate grade calculated. Therefore, for example, say for an Old Judge card the grading company assigned weightings of 30% front, 10% back and 60% photo clarity. The grader looking at a particular Old Judge assigned grades of 6 front, 1 back(damage) and 8 photo clarity. The cards aggregate grade would be 6.7 which could be rounded to a 7 and this aggregate grade would be displayed on the holder and used for regisrty purposes. For T206s the front/back weighting factor could be 65% front, 35% back, for example. This system would reflect what is important about each issue while still arriving at one grade per card.