Would this kind of grading company interest you?

[steve B]

Originally Posted by marzoumanian

For decades I was a trade press editor covering the paperboard packaging industry (cardboard boxes and folding cartons) so I'm very aware that paper "breathes (expands and contracts)." Perhaps it will take someone offering a "reward" of, say, $5000 to a computer software wiz to develop that "base" and then test card alternations to see if the software can do its job. If PSA were smart it would develop a way to initially test a card by computer and THEN follow up with the human eye. Just some off-the-cuff ideas. This hobby is still so young but it has to grow and evolve or it will (slowly) die.

I think that some functions could be automated. Centering would be fairly easy. there's already software for stamps that measures the perforations, and that's more difficult. Plus, the margins on each pair of sides would change the same with temperature/breathing etc, (And it may not be necessary to measure that closely. Those changes will be pretty small.

I think a first step would be scanning every card in for grading, at a decent resolution, and maybe adding the centering info that would be measured by the software. Maybe dimensional info too, a decently air conditioned office isn't a climate controlled metrology lab, but should be close enough for now.

The data about overall size, what sort of cut is factory etc, could be built, I could do a decent job on thickness just from my own collection. I have other more complicated database things I want to do, but I'm not a computer person, so any of them would be pretty difficult for me.
I did a spread sheet with images of as many of the 48/9 leaf variations as I could find, and that took a lot of time. It came out pretty nice though.