Are Type I Photos The Only Safe Bet In This Hobby?

[Hankphenom]

Originally Posted by Leon

How about 8 x 10 type 1s on movie lobby cards? There are lots of great things to collect. And my guess is most mid range vintage cards are fine too. But the ones with pointy corners.....a bit more suspect. (and I own a few)

Sorry, Leon, those are well known to be repros. Just kidding! (I think.)

[Peter_Spaeth]

This scandal, too, shall pass, and we'll all go right back to oohing and aahing about the stuff in slabs and buying the same stuff we always do and trusting the TPG/As and assuring ourselves that while there's a ton of fraud WE somehow have avoided it and nothing will change. Not a knock on anyone, I'll do the same thing. Human nature.

[RedsFan1941]

maybe john rogers will check in with an opinion

[bgar3]

Baseball books are a great collecting area, with many potential concentration, including history, fiction, poetry, older, recent, instructional, biographies illustrated and many more. You can also read them.

[drcy]

As a photo person, I think, beyond overprints and alterations for grades, forgeries of Pre-War baseball cards is not an issue, meaning that undetectable counterfeits will not happen. Some posters opine about modern printing technology and experts in China being able to create perfect counterfeits, but that's not true.

I also think provenance will become more and more important-- and something I've talked about often here--, because if you can establish that a card, including autograph card, pre-dated the forgery wave, that will be significant. I've often told people to establish the date of their overprinted card in case there is a future wave of overprinting forgeries.

[rhettyeakley]

Hard to go wrong with mid to lower grade vintage baseball cards. They can easily be determined to be real or fake and the money just isn’t there to enhance a card to any great degree. This is one of my favorite things about collecting sets like the Zeenut series. Typically lower grade so eye appeal becomes more important than technical grade. Hard to fake those types of cards.

[ls7plus]

Originally Posted by drcy

As a photo person, I think, beyond overprints and alterations for grades, forgeries of Pre-War baseball cards is not an issue, meaning that undetectable counterfeits will not happen. Some posters opine about modern printing technology and experts in China being able to create perfect counterfeits, but that's not true.

I also think provenance will become more and more important-- and something I've talked about often here--, because if you can establish that a card, including autograph card, pre-dated the forgery wave, that will be significant. I've often told people to establish the date of their overprinted card in case there is a future wave of overprinting forgeries.

+1. IMHO, undetectable counterfeits of pre-war cards will not be a significant issue. Cards made through different processes at significantly distinct times have always left substantially different footprints. As to autographs on cards or otherwise, there will always be forgers as long as they have significant value. Some really thorough detective work re the latter has/is being done on the other thread!

Best wishes,

Larry

[drcy]

I think alterations and high graded graded cards is likely an issues. But that's not stuff that interests me (collecting-wise).

As someone said, mid to grade cards are nice.

There will be forgeries (and I know of another problem which I've subtly alluded to before), but I think photos are safe if you know what you're doing. News photos are generally safe. For the record, of what I've seen, PSA does a good job with photos. I'm sure there's lots of other memorabilia too that's safe if you know what you're doing. The areas that are more "scary" are autographs and game used-- but I deal in neither.