Posted By:
steve yawitz...but I thought I'd chime in as one who's gone from being very enthusiastic about PSA's registry - mainly with hockey cards, I have to note - to thinking seriously about joining the Slab Liberation Army.
I was never insanely competitive with building sets but I did like to have cards that were as nice as I could afford. Plus registries do a fabulous job of tapping into collectors' neurotic side. (Mine is considerable.) And having a few sets listed was a good way to make some connections both for card deals and for just shootin' the breeze. (For what it's worth, I haven't noticed that as much in baseball as in hockey.)
Over time, though, it just seemed increasingly absurd to pay three to four times the price of a PSA 7 for a PSA 8 when the 8 might just be marginally better looking than the 7. Or not as appealing in a few cases. Coupled with my growing cynicism toward the grading industry in general, that realization spelled the end of collecting high-grade post-war cards for me.
I still have a couple of nice hockey sets from 1910 and 1923 listed and was even pretty active with one of them recently, but most of my hobby time and money has been devoted to prewar baseball over the last year. Almost all of it has either been or has wound up in PSA holders, but I'm at the point where it just seems foolish to conintue with PSA and with grading in general.
I doubt that PSA's ability to detect trimmed or altered cards is markedly better than my own. My grading is at least as consistent as theirs and takes into account my idiosyncratic preferences. And my ability to identify players and cards can't be any less accurate than theirs. So I guess I'm basically paying a premium for graded cards and paying to have cards graded so that I can make use of an online checklist and use PSA as an image hosting service. It very recently dawned on me that I could do that much more cheaply with Excel and a site like imagevent.com.
Now if I can just overcome inertia.