Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
I've seen so many (alleged) mistakes by JSA (read about them, not witnessed personally) that that doesn't do much for me.
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I can't speak to the authority of anyone specific in the authentication space. I just don't know enough about it. But I do believe there should be room for human error when it comes to expectations for something like this, but people often don't want to lend it.
I'm reminded of the late 90s and early 2000s when Sony dominated the electronics market, becoming the top seller of TVs by a fairly wide margin. If you were to go into a TV repair shop and ask them which TVs they spent the most time repairing, every single one of them would have answered "Sony". The number of complaints began to mount, and Sony eventually began to garner a reputation for selling poorly made TVs. However, the actual defect rates were better than the competition, but since Sony dominated the market, they also dominated the repair market, causing a major hit to their reputation.
PSA and JSA dominate the authentication market, so it would make sense for them to also dominate the "oops, we fucked up" market as well. The number that ultimately should matter most is one that is nearly impossible for us to get, which is the ratio of correctly authenticated items to incorrectly authenticated items. I don't know how many mistakes we should expect to see from them, but I do know that whatever the number is, it's always going to be too high for some significant percentage of collectors.