New to the forums and wanted your thoughts on these two Aarons I purchased last week

[steve B]

Nice pictures for a digital camera! Lots of people do far worse with a scanner.

A bit of what you're looking at is registration. On the 54 the red is printed a bit low and to the left. That will make some red print be below the inmage at the botom, and also make the orange background appear slightly left causing the indent for the gray of the uniform. It's also what makes the red of the feathers show up to the left of the headdress outline on the logo.

I can't really see the gray line above the fielding pic. There's a few things that could be. I don't have an Aaron to compare, but there are lots of little differences in many Topps issues that aren't really recognized as variations but are there.

The dots left of the logo are also tough to see, but stuff like that is pretty common on 50's cards. It's usually from a bit of ink spatter from overinking.
(Some could also be plate differences caused by dust in the photo or platemaking process, but I'd have to see a group of identical ones to feel confident calling it that)

Steve B

[buckydent]

Edward and Steve - thanks for your comments and analysis.

Edward, Yes - I was concerned with color touch up on the '55 and also with the batting figure of Aaron having a fuzzy face. As you can see a normal size scan of the card looks great, but when you look under magnification at the logo, you see the extra ink ( extra blue dots below the logo and circle and the extra red outline to the right of the mascot's face and nose ), it could simply be print defect or variation. Wanted to hear from '55 experts like yourself on how common this is - thank you. I do not see these issues on my '55 Clemente ( including the face not being fuzzy like Aaron's), so it seems to be with the Aaron only, for cards I have from this set.

Steve,
I used a sony 10 megapixel I got 5 years ago for my birthday, it has a zeiss lens and allows you to really zoom in which is cool for card photos because you can really magnify things ( like a loupe in that respect ). Never use a flash, and then use a black background and a lamp behind you. The scanners are good because you get the actual size of the card for measurement, which cannot be done with the camera ( so you measure manually ). I used a loupe first to analyze the edges, colors, writing and other areas. The two things that freaked me out about the '54 rookie are the bottom of the shirt having the the red color bleed into the white border in both spots because the craig list fakes have the same issue. On the other hand, the figure of Aaron is presented very nicely detail wise and his arm logo, fingers, the ball and shoes are all very detailed and visible - looks legit. The indentation of the color change from orange to grey is also subtle and looks like a 1/48th of an inch indentation even under the loupe and also as you can see in the seller scan and my blow up. Does your Aaron also have this indentation? and do you think the shadow under the hat is the right color? The red specs to the left of the logo seem legit, but again, have not seen another Aaron like this except for the raw one on ebay right now for 554.99 that has every imperfection that my graded Aaron has ( red spots, bleeding jersey, indentation, stray grey line etc). If the PSA case were perfect, I would not think twice about it being legit. The stray grey line above the fielding figure of Aaron can best be seen in the seller photo ( first photo in my 2nd batch ).

Thanks again Guys
Much appreciated

Greg