Would this kind of grading company interest you?

[bbcard1]

I am in the midst of a good career as a partner with a nice smaller firm, so I'm not going to drop everything to pursue this, but if the costs were comparable to the standard grading companies (the big ones) how would you feel about a TPGC that used laser measures to verify cards sizes and detect trimming irregularities and scanners to verify surface quality and color? I would think that that sort of equipment exists and is not prohibitively expensive.

[Leon]

Anything that makes grading more accurate would be an improvement.

[Bram99]

Originally Posted by bbcard1

I am in the midst of a good career as a partner with a nice smaller firm, so I'm not going to drop everything to pursue this, but if the costs were comparable to the standard grading companies (the big ones) how would you feel about a TPGC that used laser measures to verify cards sizes and detect trimming irregularities and scanners to verify surface quality and color? I would think that that sort of equipment exists and is not prohibitively expensive.

This scenario is almost certain to either replace or enhance the current system. PSA and Beckett will want to continue to have a human who can disregard the data and slap a preferential grade on for their friends.

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Bram99

This scenario is almost certain to either replace or enhance the current system. PSA and Beckett will want to continue to have a human who can disregard the data and slap a preferential grade on for their friends.

And you think that couldn't happen in a tech heavy company?
All it takes is someone with access and the authorizations to change the database.

I'm not crazy about the whole "use technology to solve every problem" concept.
It becomes just a different crutch than the current system. And one that's just as easily broken.

[marzoumanian]

Quick story. I know a vintage card dealer whose son is a computer software expert. A number of years ago father and son approached PSA and made it clear that the software to measure a baseball card in ALL the ways imaginable could be easily developed (taking out the human element completely).
PSA immediately rejected the idea of pursuing this. Is anyone surprised? If anything is going to change, it's going to be through technology and a NEW company, not the current ones that exist today, for obvious reasons.

Thank you and take care.

[yanksfan09]

I don’t understand how this sort of technology could account for natural legitimate size variances of issues. Especially with pre war and regional type issues. Many were factory cut with some size variation that are not trimmed. I’m also not convinced a computer program could detect other issues like pressing, or chemical baths etc. I guess humans aren’t doing the job well enough either but perhaps some sort of combo of AI and human eyes could be an improvement. It really all comes down to the integrity of the people in the company and the amount of time and effort put into each submission.

Computer laser measurement for modern standard size cards would probably work well but it gets a lot tricky with all the oddball sized pre war cards, with different methods of how they were cut and distrubuted.

[yanksfan09]

Also using a very in-depth technological process on each card I would think could be time consuming and more expensive , but maybe could be viable for higher end submissions. I just can’t see this type of effort going into every bulk $8 submission.

[D.P.Johnson]

If the new grading company could "prove" their system was able to determine authenticity and detect alterations I would be interested.

I think if the new company was able to show through side by side comparisons (or whatever) their system found altered cards the other TPGs couldn't that could be a huge selling point.

[vintagetoppsguy]

In 2019, machines can't even cut 2019 Topps product correctly, so you think machines can measure a card correctly? Cards can be stretched to a larger size then cut back down to normal size. What's the solution for that?

Here's a real solution. Quit relying on machines, TPGs or anything else and educate yourself on what alterations to look for. I'm proud to say I don't own an altered card in my collection. Never have, never will. I'm not saying I've never bought one, I think we all have. But those purchases were quickly identified and returned to the seller.

[marzoumanian]

I agree, DP Johnson. What it is going to take, in my humble opinion, is a multimillionaire who is also a big card collector, learning that he has been burned by the likes of Gary Moser. Perhaps multiple times. That individual is going to be SO angry that he will step up and offer/spend the start-up money needed to get the process started. It might take 3-5 years and, yes, he would have to prove that the technology works (perhaps by setting up a booth at the NSCC) by showing multiple examples. But that is the only way. The technology exists TODAY. I know it has already been stated that people with big bucks don't care about this issue because their cards have been slabbed and they don't want to admit that they have been duped. Maybe that's true. Maybe I'm naive. Time will tell. Who is going to step up? We shall see.

Thank you.

[barrysloate]

I believe some type of technology is inevitable, because what this debacle has proven is humans are not able to do this properly. Even if they could allot more time to examine each card, it's possible that the human eye is unable to detect these alterations, while some kind of infrared light might be able to do so quite easily.

Somebody needs to figure this out because the current system is unacceptable.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by yanksfan09

I don’t understand how this sort of technology could account for natural legitimate size variances of issues. Especially with pre war and regional type issues. Many were factory cut with some size variation that are not trimmed. I’m also not convinced a computer program could detect other issues like pressing, or chemical baths etc. I guess humans aren’t doing the job well enough either but perhaps some sort of combo of AI and human eyes could be an improvement. It really all comes down to the integrity of the people in the company and the amount of time and effort put into each submission.

Computer laser measurement for modern standard size cards would probably work well but it gets a lot tricky with all the oddball sized pre war cards, with different methods of how they were cut and distrubuted.

Also many doctored cards measure just fine, they are soaked and pressed to stretch them before being trimmed.

Edit to add I see David already made this point and he is absolutely right.

[JoeDfan]

What if the technology measured the card and printed out the % tolerance on the label (unsightly, maybe on a web site)?
For example, a 2" wide card measures 1.97"; then the collector knows exactly what they are buying.

[Bram99]

Originally Posted by marzoumanian

Quick story. I know a vintage card dealer whose son is a computer software expert. A number of years ago father and son approached PSA and made it clear that the software to measure a baseball card in ALL the ways imaginable could be easily developed (taking out the human element completely).
PSA immediately rejected the idea of pursuing this. Is anyone surprised? If anything is going to change, it's going to be through technology and a NEW company, not the current ones that exist today, for obvious reasons.

Thank you and take care.

I share this opinion and have stated it many times here on Net54

[murphy8276]

I would greatly appreciate it if PSA would have deemed these scammers' cards as Altered or Trimmed and not cards that I know for 100% fact were untouched to be minsize/EOT/ or the dreaded Altered Stock. Yet, I still continue to submit for their opinions, mostly for monetary value reasons.

[steve B]

Originally Posted by JoeDfan

What if the technology measured the card and printed out the % tolerance on the label (unsightly, maybe on a web site)?
For example, a 2" wide card measures 1.97"; then the collector knows exactly what they are buying.

They would still have to know what a factory edge should look like, and what the acceptable tolerance for that card is. Otherwise, it's a nearly meaningless number.

[Mark17]

Originally Posted by D.P.Johnson

If the new grading company could "prove" their system was able to determine authenticity and detect alterations I would be interested.

I think if the new company was able to show through side by side comparisons (or whatever) their system found altered cards the other TPGs couldn't that could be a huge selling point.

I was thinking the same thing. Demonstrate conclusively how the new system is superior by catching alterations the other companies are currently missing.

Regarding the failings of people and the human eye, I'm thinking if you have 20 graders, at any given time one or two might be new at the job, or tired, or have eye strain at the end of another long day squinting at cards. Machines don't get tired so their performance won't degrade, or vary as, say, from one individual grader to another.

As to pressing before trimming, why not add measuring card thickness too, including thickness uniformity (is the card thinner at the corners.) And it might sound silly, and maybe it is, but even weighing cards might detect paper loss from trimming. Obviously, tolerances for various issues would need to be established, since cards were not produced with rigorous quality/consistency controls.

But yes, if a new grading company came along with the commitment to constantly look for new ways to improve their process, that is what's needed. Black light, or infrared, or whatever........

It might be some years from now, but I believe eventually there will be a tool one will be able to pass over a surface (like a baseball card) and the tool will be able to perform carbon dating without damaging the card at all. So if there is anything modern on a vintage card besides a human fingerprint, someday it should be detectable.

[Peter_Spaeth]

People love to talk about technology. Has anyone here seen a machine, computer, device, whatever, reliably authenticate and grade a card? Until that happens, with due respect, it just feels like feel-good talk to me.

[chalupacollects]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

People love to talk about technology. Has anyone here seen a machine, computer, device, whatever, reliably authenticate and grade a card? Until that happens, with due respect, it just feels like feel-good talk to me.

Where are those Microsoft engineers that patented a new automated grading process???

Maybe planning their emergence?

[Mark17]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

People love to talk about technology. Has anyone here seen a machine, computer, device, whatever, reliably authenticate and grade a card? Until that happens, with due respect, it just feels like feel-good talk to me.

Tools that measure size, thickness, etc. are of course in existence. Other methods to determine foreign substances also exist. Think of what's been done in the areas of crime scene forensics.

And more advancements will be developed. You may have missed the first part of my quote:

Originally Posted by Mark17

It might be some years from now, but I believe eventually there will be a tool one will be able to pass over a surface (like a baseball card) and the tool will be able to perform carbon dating without damaging the card at all. So if there is anything modern on a vintage card besides a human fingerprint, someday it should be detectable.

So, can I go to Walmart today and buy a card grading/alteration detection machine? No. Does technology exist to catch a lot of trimming, pressing, and other stuff? Yes. Will detection methods continually improve over time? Again, yes.

Peter, what alternative do you propose? Sticking with table after table of people looking at cards, ignoring technological tools that could be of great assistance?

[Peter_Spaeth]

If and when the technology exists and it's proven to be reliable then fine, but it feels too futuristic to me to be a realistic solution to the current problem. I am glad to be proven wrong as we obviously are not in a good place.

[steve B]

The problem with using most technologies to authenticate cards and detect alterations, is that you also need the baseline information to compare to.

A card that's pressed and trimmed will be thinner, or thinner in the pressed areas. And measuring thickness is pretty easy, even without modern technology.
But the question becomes "what thickness should that card be, and how much could that naturally vary based on the papermaking technology at the time. in the 1880's (where I've seen studies of printed items specifically looking at the paper thickness of hundreds of copies) +/- .003 isn't unreasonable.
That spec may be a bit tighter by 1910, and should be much tighter for modern cards. I just measured a handful of modern cards - list on the postwar side - and didn't find much variation at all.

Other groups have studied the chemical makeup of the inks and seizing(sp?) of the paper. The equipment used is expensive, and requires a bit of interpretation of the results, but some interesting things have been learned.

As far as I know, there isn't anyone who has studied this stuff for cards. If it's in a database, I don't think it's been publicly available.
There also isn't one for any of the other things that would be of interest, like UV reaction. The only bit I know is out there is that the 1991 Topps backs have two different inks, one reactive the other not. Other Topps sets in the junk wax era also have the same issue, which I mentioned once, but haven't pursued yet, not even as far as dividing my sets. I collect a lot more that isn't really cataloged or known anywhere. (And yes, I really need to do at least a few posts on those)

If it isn't know exactly what a normal card should be, no entirely reliable comparison can be made.
Currently, someone with experience can tell. After years you get a feel for when something just isn't "right". But to have a machine do that you have to give it the knowledge.

[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.

[conor912]

What I want to see is a grading company that grades and slabs graded and slabbed cards. I think a card in a slab in a slab would be really spiffy. And slap some f***ing stickers on that thing for good measure. Oh, and LAOs...lots of them....and guranteees.... can't forget the guarantees.

[wondo]

Originally Posted by conor912

What I want to see is a grading company that grades and slabs graded and slabbed cards. I think a card in a slab in a slab would be really spiffy. And slap some f***ing stickers on that thing for good measure. Oh, and LAOs...lots of them....and guranteees.... can't forget the guarantees.

This seems like a ridiculous idea. How would you see the card in between the additional layers?

[conor912]

Originally Posted by wondo

This seems like a ridiculous idea. How would you see the card in between the additional layers?

The LOAs would have photos of the card, duh.

[Sogcollector]

What ever happened to third party grader Alan Hager from the early 1990’s? Based upon what we are seeing now with the PSA grading fiasco, how did Hager’s grading compare to PSA’s? Was it materially better or worse? Why didn’t his grading methodology last? I bought a graded Jordan RC from him in 1993 when I was a kid and recall buying a book he wrote with photographic examples of various grades.

[lowpopper]

Sorry guys but this is nonsense.

A peripheral device authenticating cards? Aside from the storing of the image for
future comparisons, the only usable data that can be reliably extracted from
a scan are measurements for total size and centering. Even that can easily be
thrown off by a print defect or a slightly irregular cut.

As far as alteration detection, the only way to use imaging technology to
identify altered cards would be to have a massive database of card
"before images" to compare to. Even if compiling a database with millions
of entries was feasible, it could never be 100% accurate due to the amount
of cards that come off the same print runs and have virtually identical physical
qualities. There would be too many "perfect matches" to identify the true
original.

I know not everyone has a tech background so I understand the optimism
when a discussion like this starts. At best, implementing technology can ASSIST
us with card grading. It could never be done with perfect accuracy. There will
always be errors: human and mechanical. The best we can do is use before and
after pictures on currently graded or serial numbered cards. Anything beyond
that would not improve upon the accuracy of a human physically measuring and
inspecting a card.

Has anybody calculated the current accuracy rate of the current grading process?
I hear a myriad of complaints regarding the grades that were assessed wrong, but
how many are done correctly? I would imagine it is something very north of 99%,
no? Millions upon millions of graded cards out there and a few thousand are turning
up bad? As far as ratios go, that sounds irrefutably reliable for a paid service. Yes,
one could make the argument that the sample size is smaller because the focus
seems to be on the higher value pieces, but that should not render the lesser value
slabbed cards to be irrelevant here. There may never be a way produce a process that
is void of error, collusion, or dubious behaviors. However, the current grading process
as a whole IS accurate based on the numbers we are aware of.

[Bigdaddy]

I would wager that a AI/machine learning tool set could do a much better job of authenticating and grading cards than a human ever could. At a minimum, it would be more consistent than the current 'which grader got this submission?' system that we seem to have.
There are free apps for your iphone that can measure items, are you telling me that a system specifically designed to measure cards, in all three dimensions, would not be better than a human?
Look what computers are doing in solving crimes, tracing genealogy, facial recognition, image processing, etc. Cameras in the Dallas Cowboys stadium scan the crowd and identify areas where trouble may be brewing in the crowd by analyzing the dynamics of the people. Just today I read about Stanford researchers who used Google street view images (50 million of them) to predict local demographics and election voting patterns. The machines were able to process the images in approximately two weeks, where a human expert would have taken over 15 years. And that was just to classify the images, not to use that data to predict anything.
Now these machines are only as good as the software and sensors on them, but their ability to quickly process images and extract useful data from them is far beyond what a human can do. And they do it much quicker and more consistently.
Are they perfect? No. Is this an easy task? No. But it is one where machine vision along with AI/machine learning would make a tremendous leap in the card grading/authentication clap-trap that we have now.

[Bigdaddy]

Originally Posted by lowpopper

Sorry guys but this is nonsense.

A peripheral device authenticating cards? Aside from the storing of the image for
future comparisons, the only usable data that can be reliably extracted from
a scan are measurements for total size and centering.

Ah, much more than that. Surface indentations and irregularities (indications of erasures), thickness, weight, florescence of the inks (like when folks use a black light), very small wrinkles, physical characteristics of the edges, foreign substances, etc. By using a sample of known good cards, an machine learning algorithm could be trained to detect abnormalities that are otherwise invisible to the human eye.

Think of it as looking at a card with a different set of eyes - highly magnified and sensitive to things that we don't normally see. Just like a bat sees objects at night when we cannot, or a dog detects smells that are beyond what we can smell. We don't use people to sniff for drugs, we use dogs.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by conor912

What I want to see is a grading company that grades and slabs graded and slabbed cards. I think a card in a slab in a slab would be really spiffy. And slap some f***ing stickers on that thing for good measure. Oh, and LAOs...lots of them....and guranteees.... can't forget the guarantees.

Lol

[Bigdaddy]

Originally Posted by conor912

What I want to see is a grading company that grades and slabs graded and slabbed cards. I think a card in a slab in a slab would be really spiffy. And slap some f***ing stickers on that thing for good measure. Oh, and LAOs...lots of them....and guranteees.... can't forget the guarantees.

And I want a 3D printer that can print 3D printers.

[conor912]

Originally Posted by Bigdaddy

And I want a 3D printer that can print 3D printers.

C'mon, Tom. We're trying to think outside the box here.

3D printed 3D printers are so 2018.
https://hackaday.com/2018/11/27/the-...ed-3d-printer/

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by Sogcollector

What ever happened to third party grader Alan Hager from the early 1990’s? Based upon what we are seeing now with the PSA grading fiasco, how did Hager’s grading compare to PSA’s? Was it materially better or worse? Why didn’t his grading methodology last? I bought a graded Jordan RC from him in 1993 when I was a kid and recall buying a book he wrote with photographic examples of various grades.

[unprintable]

[ValKehl]

Originally Posted by Sogcollector

What ever happened to third party grader Alan Hager from the early 1990’s? Based upon what we are seeing now with the PSA grading fiasco, how did Hager’s grading compare to PSA’s? Was it materially better or worse? Why didn’t his grading methodology last? I bought a graded Jordan RC from him in 1993 when I was a kid and recall buying a book he wrote with photographic examples of various grades.

Have there been problems found with cards graded by Alan Hager?

[conor912]

Originally Posted by ValKehl

Have there been problems found with cards graded by Alan Hager?

Oy. Don't give Moser any ideas.

[wondo]

Originally Posted by Sogcollector

What ever happened to third party grader Alan Hager from the early 1990’s? Based upon what we are seeing now with the PSA grading fiasco, how did Hager’s grading compare to PSA’s? Was it materially better or worse? Why didn’t his grading methodology last? I bought a graded Jordan RC from him in 1993 when I was a kid and recall buying a book he wrote with photographic examples of various grades.

We have now come full circle. Some of you youngin's may not know this, but the original TPG (Alan Hagar's Accugrade) was developed with the specific purpose of slabbing doctored cards and duping the collector into buying his product. It had nothing to do with authentication or grading standards. It was less reliable than PRO! I am not sure that PRO isn't a direct descendant of Accugrade.

[robw]

Someone must have mentioned something like this method before? I’ve always thought there should be a way the TPGs could detect resubmissions with proprietary invisible ink. Wouldn’t help a brand new submission, but would seemingly be a deterrent from resubmission. I thought this is done for some autographs.

Leads to another question...if this method was used on a card, would a collector downgrade the card as being altered or “marked?”

[Mark17]

Originally Posted by robw

Someone must have mentioned something like this method before? I’ve always thought there should be a way the TPGs could detect resubmissions with proprietary invisible ink. Wouldn’t help a brand new submission, but would seemingly be a deterrent from resubmission. I thought this is done for some autographs.

Leads to another question...if this method was used on a card, would a collector downgrade the card as being altered or “marked?”

I would not want any substance added to my vintage cards.

Blowout seems to do a pretty good job identifying cards by natural fiber patterns on the back of cards, sort of like facial recognition techniques. So I don't think anything would need to be added in a lot of cases.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by wondo

We have now come full circle. Some of you youngin's may not know this, but the original TPG (Alan Hagar's Accugrade) was developed with the specific purpose of slabbing doctored cards and duping the collector into buying his product. It had nothing to do with authentication or grading standards. It was less reliable than PRO! I am not sure that PRO isn't a direct descendant of Accugrade.

Alan did invent the slab, or had a patent on it anyhow, I believe. If anyone can find one of the old Accugrade ads in SCD from the early 1990s it would be amusing to look at.

[Copa7]

I find it interesting that many of the sports we follow have went to electronic officiating. (replay and goal line technology)

While realizing that some human still has to make the final decision, there are flaws as well as advantages.

Will we find a parallel in the modern card grading, perhaps? Just thoughts...

[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.

[steve B]

Originally Posted by robw

Someone must have mentioned something like this method before? I’ve always thought there should be a way the TPGs could detect resubmissions with proprietary invisible ink. Wouldn’t help a brand new submission, but would seemingly be a deterrent from resubmission. I thought this is done for some autographs.

Leads to another question...if this method was used on a card, would a collector downgrade the card as being altered or “marked?”

I would.

[T205 GB]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

People love to talk about technology. Has anyone here seen a machine, computer, device, whatever, reliably authenticate and grade a card? Until that happens, with due respect, it just feels like feel-good talk to me.

Nope. Not even possible.

[ullmandds]

I just don't think the financial investment in such a "device" that would/could grade cards is feasible to create to be cost effective?

[T205 GB]

Originally Posted by steve B

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.

Pretty darn close. Lots of transparency is needed

Pete you are also correct. It takes a lot of $$ to make a machine.

[swarmee]

Originally Posted by lowpopper

I hear a myriad of complaints regarding the grades that were assessed wrong, but how many are done correctly? I would imagine it is something very north of 99%, no?

When you mean "wrong," are you only classifying it as cards that are altered being given a numerical grade?

I would also declare these as wrong:
1) Mechanical errors: this includes wrong set information, wrong card variant, wrong card number, wrong grade attached to card by accident or process failure, multiple cards put in wrong slabs at same time, spelling errors, etc. I believe just this category would easily exceed 1% of cards/coins submitted. It's around 3-5% on the hundreds of cards I submitted.
2) Cards that are marked or miscut that are not labeled with the appropriate "we never remove these MC or MK" qualifiers, even if you ask us to?
3) Cards that are MINSIZ but slabbed with a number grade anyways: See 1975 Topps Mini set collectors thread on CU/PSA board.
4) Cards that PSA could easily identify with an internet search but are unwilling to and return as N9: NO SPEC INFO.
5) Cards that are NOT MINSIZ or EOT but are returned ungraded or slabbed AUTHENTIC ALTERED anyways.
6) Hand Cut cards given number grades despite not following PSA's own rules that the borders must be present?

You still want to tell me their failure rate is less than 1%? Watch some of the PSA reveals from Vintage Breaks and see how many times PSA slabs O-PEE-CHEE cards as Topps and Topps as O-Pee-Chees, even on easily distinguishable sets like 1971 OPC Baseball with the yellow-orange backs and different layout. They are awful at identifying modern card variants, even screwing up superfractors and labeling many hundred dollar variants as the base cards.

If their error rate isn't closer to 10%, I'll eat my hat.

[lowpopper]

Originally Posted by swarmee

When you mean "wrong," are you only classifying it as cards that are altered being given a numerical grade?

I would also declare these as wrong:
1) Mechanical errors: this includes wrong set information, wrong card variant, wrong card number, wrong grade attached to card by accident or process failure, multiple cards put in wrong slabs at same time, spelling errors, etc. I believe just this category would easily exceed 1% of cards/coins submitted. It's around 3-5% on the hundreds of cards I submitted.
2) Cards that are marked or miscut that are not labeled with the appropriate "we never remove these MC or MK" qualifiers, even if you ask us to?
3) Cards that are MINSIZ but slabbed with a number grade anyways: See 1975 Topps Mini set collectors thread on CU/PSA board.
4) Cards that PSA could easily identify with an internet search but are unwilling to and return as N9: NO SPEC INFO.
5) Cards that are NOT MINSIZ or EOT but are returned ungraded or slabbed AUTHENTIC ALTERED anyways.
6) Hand Cut cards given number grades despite not following PSA's own rules that the borders must be present?

You still want to tell me their failure rate is less than 1%? Watch some of the PSA reveals from Vintage Breaks and see how many times PSA slabs O-PEE-CHEE cards as Topps and Topps as O-Pee-Chees, even on easily distinguishable sets like 1971 OPC Baseball with the yellow-orange backs and different layout. They are awful at identifying modern card variants, even screwing up superfractors and labeling many hundred dollar variants as the base cards.

If their error rate isn't closer to 10%, I'll eat my hat.

John, you just read into my post wrong.

to clarify...

Mechanical meaning anything to do with a machine, device, computer, etc.

not referring to "mech error" when PSA mislabels a card.

Bad was referring to the cards on the new suspect list. Not in reference to
under/over grades, mislabels or anything like that. My accuracy rate was
only referring to those cards that are on or will be on the list compared
to anything that is currently sitting soundly in a holder free of suspicion.

Purple Label would not exist if I believed every card was accurately graded
just in regard to the numerical grade.

Hope that clears things up

[swarmee]

Why do you only seem to care about this one list? Why are you not worried about purging all the cards from all the known bad actors from the PSA Cert system? Does someone need to dot all the i's and cross all the t's before you'll believe that PSA is ridiculously awful at their job of identifying alterations and "isolated bad actors" that PSA has allowed to submit tainted (and possibly even non-tainted) cards for the past 20 years under their own names?
I get it; you're part of the group who has something to lose if PSA goes under or takes a gut-punch to the abdomen. I've got thousands of PSA graded cards, but I'd rather see with this dealt with from the top in a manner that restores trust to the marketplace.
The hand-wringing and then forgetting is such a common pattern response to this issue that you can see the old guard believing that nothing will ever change, as long as we all get rich watching fraud happen. If that's true, we're all the perpetrators of fraud. Well, I'm not standing on the sidelines. I'm making a stand.

But to keep trivializing the depth of this fraud is hysterical to me. We're not buying it.

[ullmandds]

im right there with you john...but what does purging of all the altered cards mean? Destroy them? Try to permanently label them...give them a scarlet letter? I'd be good with either scenario...but it aint gonna happen!!!!!

Imagine if they were destroyed???? The pops would be dramatically affected in some cases!