orifdoc

Well, you apparently don't mince words.... I'll give you that.

Mark Feld's response is probably more what you were looking for. I incorrectly assumed that your title was more of a commentary than an actual question. You wouldn't be the first to take such a position and the whole topic has generated hundreds of pages of discussion.

There exist coins of high quality and coins of low quality. Distinguishing them is the trick. Knowledge helps. Third-party grading helps. CAC review helps. Consensus opinion helps. Good eyesight helps. Some people simply literally cannot see the difference.

There is no true standard though. Coins don't actually have a correct grade. Every opinion is worth something. According to the industry/hobby and the majority of the players, some opinions are worth more than others.

It's also helpful to remember that great coins were great coins before the invention of our current grading system, slabs, and stickers, and if cared for, they will continue to be great coins long after our current standards have changed.

Sounds like you've already made up your mind.

There's plenty of ways to do this and I played around with a few. The first few tries weren't very smooth at all. I used PhotoShop Elements to do this.

The coin and camera are set in place and don't move. I took something like 10 or 11 photos while moving a single hand-held halogen light around the lens a few degrees at a time. Focus is manually set, the exposure and shutter are manually set, the mirror is locked open, and I trigger the shutter remotely with Canon's tethered image capture software. Each frame gets cropped and I resized everything to 300x300, which still results in a 1.2 MB image. I duplicated most of the frames to loop it like this:

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1.

Each frame plays for 0.1 sec IIRC.

A NewP, from David Kahn:

A little thing I just taught myself how to do. The lighting technique needs some work & over-emphasizes chatter in the fields, but I think it's pretty cool for showing luster:

Back to the DBH:

From John at CRO:

Beautiful Randal Hoard N-13 1820. David Kahn sold one of these to me a few months ago with a very similar look.

I love seeing a big clip on an otherwise excellent coin. That's sometimes a tough combination.

From the ANA:

From the ANA:

The vast majority of the 1964-D Peace dollars "on the market" are NOT the work of Mr Carr.

Sometimes you buy a coin on a hunch and it ends up looking even better than you thought it might. This one came out of the recent Summer Fun Auction:

Nice look to those last two.

A blue sheen on old copper is always nice:

Nice Morgan. Most are too baggy for my taste. That one has a nice portrait.

Nice 39-O. Always fun to see them. Cool die breaks too.

Couple of nice dimes. I love the no-stars. Nice look & cool die breaks.

Here's a couple NewPs I'm excited about:

Cool clash on that 1855. Easy to see the die rotation.

One of the more common types (JR-1) from the recent sale of Gorman's Capped Bust Dime Variety set.

Yowsa. Nice Trade buck.

I posted this ATS, but it's cool enough to share in more than one place.

Nice Barber Half. I owned one of Glenn's half dollars for a while too. Maybe should have kept that one.