Grade Tech - WOW! More and more, I really like this company

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Posted By: Bruce Moreland

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1851273768

I keep going back to the original card. What bugs me is not so much that they graded a reprint, but that they missed the grade by a lot.

If you blow up the scan, it's evident that the corners are not only worn, they are rounded off. And the top right is not only rounded off, it's crunched, really badly.

The only question for me here is if I'd be embarassing myself if I said I thought the card deserved a mercy 5 for having bad corners but nice everything else. A 7 is out of the question.

I am having a hard time with their corner scans. In the case of the 7, the corner scans all look pretty bad, but the card looks like it has worse tops than bottoms. It's hard to really figure out what you are seeing in the corner scans.

In the case of the 8, it looks like the top right in particular has a very rough touch, but I don't see this very evidently on the card scan (which admittedly is hard to blow up very well).

I think that those scans might be so heavily magnified that they make any corner look worn, except for a corner that's really worn.

What would help a good deal more is some sense of scale in the corner scans.

I think that I don't trust their grades yet, which is what it comes down to for me, foremost. I know what a NM or NM/MT card should look like it, and if I open a package and what I get is not what I think I should get, I will be disappointed. I still have lingering doubts about authentication as well. It doesn't matter how good everything else is if the grader can't grade and authenticate.

I bet that the amount of work (other than grading) that this company does is way in excess of what any other grading company does, and I kind of wonder if they will be able to keep it up and make money. It would take significant energy just to make five scans and print the labels for the CD.

If they become popular they are going to have real problems just with web hosting. The front scans they keep on their web page are a MEGABYTE in size. That is a lot of space and a lot of bandwidth.

bruce