[barrysloate]

With daguerreotypes the value is in the composition and the quality of the image. What one typically finds is a portrait of an unknown person. If the image is bold and clear, if the subject is young and attractive, and if it is nicely hand colored, it is very collectable. Even more valuable are images of buildings, outdoor scenes, gold miners, soldiers, men holding the tools of their trade, children with toys, dogs (rare because it was hard to get a dog to sit perfectly still for a full minute), or anything that has some aesthetic quality. Many of those are thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars.

Plate size is a factor too. Dags and ambros can be found in full plate (about the size of a book cover), half plate, quarter plate, sixth plate and ninth plate sizes, as well as some oddball ones too. Dags are also found embedded in gold jewelry. Most common are sixth plates. Larger plates, especially full ones, are worth a large premium.