| ls7plus |
10-21-2012 06:52 PM |
Re real or not
It's certainly not that difficult to tell if the card is real vs rescreened, i.e., a reprint or counterfeit made by taking a picture of a real card. Just check the print dot pattern, especially along the inner and outer black border lines and those around the name at the bottom of the card, as well as the name itself. As concerns the borders themselves, if they're straight and true, instead of comprised of an irregular dot pattern making them fuzzy under magnification (I suggest a 16x loupe), the card is almost certainly real. The dot pattern for Joe's uniform and face should also be regular (meaning linear), rather than seemingly random. As someone else also suggested, insofar as alterations are concerned, a black light can be quite "illuminating." In the early days of TPG, virtually every dealer buying raw cards brought his loupe to his table, not only to check dot patterns, but the card's edges (to determine if the card had been run through a paper press and thereby minutely enlarged, then cut back down to size to eliminate worn corners, thus producing "new" sharp corners. There used to be several fairly well-known dealers specializing in such altered cards before TPG really took hold, who would sell such cards as NMt-Mt. TPG has, IMHO, been of immense benefit to the hobby by putting these scammers out of business!
Hope this helps in the future,
Larry
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