The PSA Type System: Should it follow the photography market?

[Jersey City Giants]

Originally Posted by horzverti

The name and Cubs 1914 is in Charlie's hand. Often if you see a date written by Conlon it means that the print was produced well after the image was captured. Conlon would probably receive a request for a print of one of his older images and he would just produce a new print off of his original neg. I would think that he may have been inconsistent with writing dates on prints made off of an older neg = it can be tough to determine if a print was created near the date of image capture or well after. To make a best guess you must consider multiple factors: paper stock, stamp, written detail on back, photo margins, etc. This is assuming the print was produced from the original Conlon created neg.

But it all seems to boil down to a best guess after considering the paper type. In terms of collecting that is a lot of money riding on someone's "guess" IMHO. I know grading is subjective but I feel most of us are skillful enough to grade many of the cards on our own. Photo's without exact dates just seem like a crap shoot if you are gunning for Type I status regardless what PSA says.

In terms of cropping that would be meaningless to me as I developed my own negatives (I shot for my college newspaper and then as a freelancer after college) and sometimes played around with cropping the same photo different ways. This was all done in the same time frame (same day). Now I never dated any of the photos ( I did use a stamp but it was just to make sure anyone using the photo would have to credit me).