Posted By:
MarkThe question of which company has higher standards is a bit unclear regarding Turkey Red cards. It does seem there are a lot of overgraded T3 cards out there, suggesting that PSA may indeed have lowered there standards. However, one area where submitters might want to take another look is cards with pinholes, which is very common with T3.
PSA policy is to not give any card a grade higher than 1 if the card has a pinhole. It doesn't matter how nice the card is otherwise. I recently acquired an absolutely beautiful Jordan and Herzog card. If not for the extremely tiny pinhole hidden in the top border, I am certain it would have graded at least a 5, very possibly even a 6. However, because of the pinhole, it was graded PSA 1.
If you read the SGC grading standards, it is possible for a card to have one or more pinholes and still receive a grade of SGC 30. So, if you have Turkey Reds with pinholes, as so many of them do, it would might be better to submit to SGC than PSA.
Having written that, I should also note that I called The people at SGC recently to get clarification on this. The person I spoke with, I don't know his name, did confirm a grade of 20 was possible if the card was otherwise very clean. However, he was less willing to commit the possibility of a grade of 30. Anyone submitting T3 cards with pinholes might want to clarify the grading standards beforehand.
This issue is important to me because, along with T206, the main focus of my collection is Turkey Reds. About 35 of the cards in my set have one or more pinholes. I've been waiting for pricing info from SGC before deciding which company, if any, I go with. Now I'm not sure what to do. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Getting back to the original intent of the thread, I may choose to forego grading altogether because of the high cost. $4,000 is a lot of money for a bunch of plastic. I could sure buy a lot of very nice cards with that!