Will Older Slabbed Cards Ever Carry A Premium??

[steve B]

Originally Posted by bnorth

To the bold section. LOL, why not just use the exact same type of machine that made the originals. It boggles my mind that people think that printing a picture on a piece of paper is somehow hard to do. Nothing needs to be developed it has been here as long as the ability to make the originals. Same goes for making the plastic slabs.

The part that amazes me the most is that is has not been done more than it already has been.

That pretty much nails it.

The technology used on many of the popular sets is over a hundred years old. Almost exactly, the change from Litho with stones to plates started around 1910.

Making something that would slide through the current brief examination is doable, maybe even with modern technology making it less labor intensive. I'm not familiar enough with the really modern stuff to be sure, but a lot of what's done is software. If the software doesn't allow certain things, it can be modified.

Making something truly undetectable?
That's a much harder task. I believe it could be done, but to my knowledge nobody has done the technical work to know precisely what to do. Nor have they done that same work to detect it. Why? Because it's very time consuming, fairly expensive, and overall not commercially productive.

They have done that work for other things, so a metal object can be analyzed to see if the metal has the right precise composition for the supposed time period and maker. The device to check that isn't cheap, but it's a lot less expensive than it used to be.

I'm not as expert as I'd like to be, but I figure if I really wanted to I could give it a good go at making something that would be very hard to detect.
But having learned the stuff I don't know yet, and having bought the equipment and supplies and set up a shop.... I could probably make just as much money doing stuff that wouldn't get me arrested and jailed.