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Posted By: davidcycleback

Common old news service stamps include ACME Newspictures,
International News Photos, Atlantic & Pacific, Keystone View,
Bain News Service (George Grantham Bain), United Press and
United Press Association. All of these companies went out
of business or changed their name 1950s or earlier, so their
stamps only appear on older photos.

United Press International (UPI) is modern (late 1950s and after).
Associated Press has been around for a long, long time and
their stamp can appear on both old and new photos.

Image quality is in the eye of the beholder, and I'm not about to
tell collectors what they are supposed to buy. Forgetting the issue
of first or second or fourth generation, what matters about the image is
how the image, including the clarity, appeals to you. If you like the
image, you like it. If you feel the image is too underdeveloped, you
don't need a photo historian to tell you about the image's quality.

It's like with baseball cards. You don't have to be an SGC grader
or Bill Mastro to decide which baseball card appeals to you aestheticly.
A beginning collector might want some outside advice to determine age,
authenticity and value, but his opinion on the beauty of a set is as
valid as Mastro's.

Amongst the best aesthetic education is look at a wide variety of photos,
decide what you like, what you don't, what is rare, what is common. To say,
"That's the sweetest Ted Williams photo I've seen," impies that you've seen
a number of Ted Williams photos before.