It's much cheaper to train people to do the grading.
My wife works in software, and I taught her how to spot problems in a few minutes so she could help me do initial sorting on big junk lots.
And when we talk about the occasional card I'm considering she'll make comments like "why is that only a 30" or " that's a pretty weak 40 right?"
Writing software that could handle all the nuances of grading would be extremely expensive, to say nothing of the cost of sensors to detect the trimming without affecting the card.
It's doable, but a seat of the pants guess is a reliable grading machine would run close to a million. Some aspects could be automated cheaply, size and centering, and some of the worst recolorings. The trick would be to tell a recoloring apart from a stain or slight localized fading.
Steve B
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