Revenant

Did we used to have an emoji about beating a dead horse? 

1 hour ago, Mohawk said:

All true and the coins are often much scarcer than collectible US gold coin issues.  With US gold, it tends to be super common or super rare with very few issues in between and it's all overpriced for what it is, in my opinion.

Well, it is a supply&demand curve afterall...  But yeah. I just have a hard time paying market prices for US gold coins just because I just don't like them enough for the price. On the other hand, I got looking into Italian 20 Lira coins from 100-150 years ago because my wife lived in Italy for 3 years as a child. I'd love to have one of those 20 Lira in my collection. Same for a classic British Sovereign. 

6 minutes ago, Mohawk said:

I see your points here, William and they make a lot of sense.  However, there are classic US coins which are common as dirt as well that I'd argue are heading for the same issues down the road.  Morgan dollars would be the main ones I'm thinking of here.  For example, everyone says that the 1893-S is a rare coin.  However, I'd argue only in the context of present demand is it rare.  The brick and mortar shop I worked at was in a smaller city, and we had at least seven 1893-S's on hand at any given time, sometimes more.  1889-CC's we had about 18 of at any given time.  1909-S VDB's are another one......the shop I worked at had 50 of them.  50!  And we could have bought more almost any day of the week.  1928 Peace Dollars, we had about 25 at any given time.  And this was a small shop in a small city!  Imagine what the big boys have hidden away.  My point is that many classic US coins have this same problem.  There are very, very few US coins from any era which are actually rare.  There's just an insane amount of demand for them at the present time.  My time at the shop really opened my eyes to this.

Very true, and one of the reasons I started my 10G set when I did and not any kind of US set. Prettt much any US classic gold set will have very high premiums over melt for Gem uncirc grades. European gold on the other hand - you can get graded gem uncirc coins for just a 20% premium over melt sometimes. Much lower threshold for entry.

9 hours ago, Mohawk said:

Bsshog.....just because you don't like something doesn't mean collecting it is throwing your money away.  I could very easily say from my perspective

I think what he's getting at is the concept of the modern condition rarity - a coin that is common as sand on the beach that someone pays hundreds or thousands for because of the number on the label - something I don't think you would have seen before the TPGs. We all see it all the time. "Wow! Rare Pop 1! Highest Known! Buy now! Invest today!" … "Yeah... except... 99+% of these today are ungraded (see foreign coins and notes especially), there could be 10 or 100 more of these out there that just aren't graded." I see this all the time with Zimbabwe notes - someone thinking it's worth $200 because their 66 EPQ note - which is good but not exceptionally high - is "pop 1*" - *when looking only at PMG and not PCGS and forgetting the fact that the note is very common and con be bought in uncirc condition for $2 and maybe 0.01% of them have been graded.

Just saying... we all know its an issue, You can love and collect moderns and still admit that some of this might be a bubble pretending to be an "investment."

56 minutes ago, bsshog40 said:

Nothing like throwing more money away at moderns. 

Give it 50 years and they won't be modern any more? Though I doubt they'll age as well as the mercury dimes, the walking liberty halfs, or the standing liberty quarters...

On 2/24/2019 at 8:26 AM, Paul Pecora said:

UNC CLEANED --- Cleaned with what ? They should make available how it was determined. My coin looks more like a scratch than "cleaned." For the money we pay, there should be a more elaborate description on how they determined their conclusion. Don't get me wrong. NGC is top notch. EOM

 

Yeah. I have several NGC certified 19th century gold coins from the Netherlands, some of which feature die polish lines because they were struck with slightly later (not new) die-state. The lines that produces / the look that gives the coin can sometimes give the coin an odd appearance, almost like it was brushed. I remember years ago when I was first starting to collect that these lines threw me off so bad I thought I had an NGC-graded silver eagle that had been cleaned, which I knew made no sense but I'd never heard about die polishing or die polish lines and I just didn't know what I was looking at. The signs that I coin has been cleaned or rubbed can honestly be really subtle sometimes and it can trick you. I can understand the frustration there.

I'm sorry you got disappointed on this. Hopefully you'll have more luck next time.

5 minutes ago, Conder101 said:

But if they hadn't you wouldn't have any coins now.  If they hadn't a silver dollar would now be the size of the old three cent silver piece with the Half, quarter, and dime proportionally sized.   Would you really want to try and put quarters into a vending machine that weighed half a gram and were 3 mm in diameter?

I think that assumes we would have continued on the same trajectory regardless and I'm not sure we would have, but that's just post-gaming history and I wasn't around (or born) at the time it all went down.

6 hours ago, Johnston2 said:

To a lot of people they stopped making coins in 1964.

They now make tokens.

Except we've pretty much always had lower denomination coins made out of copper and we've had nickels for a long time. So, I don't accept the idea that a coin can't be a legitimate coin just because it isn't  silver or gold.

Yeah. I would have preferred it if they hadn't debased the money as well, but that doesn't mean it stopped being money.

I've always found the NORFED stuff / story interesting but they aren't that pretty and I just can't justify the premiums people want for them. Personally, while interesting his plan wasn't bright - there was never any chance the gov't would let him get away with that.

1 hour ago, Just Bob said:

Has anyone ever tried the milk jug light diffuser set-up with a phone camera?

 

No, but I may do it soon. That could be fun to try.

What I use most of the time is basically what's in the photo below except I use strobes / speedlites and a DSLR with a macro lens. My step-father bought the folding, portable shadow-box / diffuser box as a present years ago but I've never been a fan of those lights. I like a little more power.

10 minutes ago, coinsandmedals said:

You bring up a very good point about calibrating my computer screen. I am ashamed to say that it did not even cross my mind.  

I wouldn't be embarrassed. I brought it up specifically because it's something that many people aren't aware of. I deal with digital photography A LOT more than most people.

I can honestly say that I don't think I'm qualified to give you advice on photos. I usually just bluff my way through as best as I can and what you have seems pretty solid overall.

A few things I might suggest would be using diffusion panels and / or bouncing lights off white surfaces / umbrellas might help soften your light and avoid blown out highlights and speculative shine on the coin surface. As far as color goes? Every type of light has a typical range or "temperature" values, measured in Kelvin, the roughly corresponds to the temperature at which a black body radiator would release radiation. You can figure that out for most types of light / bulb and cameras come with presets for the most common ones, but there's a bit of natural variance in it and the temperature of the lights will tend to shift over the life of the light. So it's usually necessary for me to adjust the image in the computer to get the results as good as possible. I usually shoot with a DSLR, shoot in RAW and adjust the temperature setting later when I'm on my PC.

Something else to consider is that your computer monitor / display can be / needs to be properly calibrated or what you see and what we see might not be the same thing.

Don't you just love digital photography?

Well, if you're going to revive an old thread, those coins are a nice reason to do it.

Forgive me if I missed an announcement somewhere along the way, but is NGC no longer printing and mailing physical certificates to the Category winners? I know last year you had to ask for it if you wanted printed ones sent to you but I haven't seen anything about that this year.

I can understand if NGC is going to discontinue that. I'm sure printing and mailing all those things every year was quite an undertaking and expense. I'm mostly just curious about it.

On ‎10‎/‎16‎/‎2018 at 4:10 AM, Morpheus1967 said:

Couldn't agree more with @Mohawk and @Mk123.  In fact, I would take it one step further.  I have no problem with the PCGS coins being grandfathered in.  The ones that were already in registry sets before the change.  However, if you have PCGS coins in your registry set, I don't think they should count for the awards.  There would be nothing wrong with allowing the coins to remain, but with a zero point value.  Allowing them to still compete for NGC registry awards would be akin to having a taste test for your favorite Pepsi drink and allowing Coke to compete.

The registry calculates ranks with and without PCGS coins in effected sets and you get awards / ribbon icons awarded based on both rankings. So if you're #1 when counting only NGC coins, you'll still get recognized for that, even if you aren't #1 when the PCGS coins are included. If you're winning both ways the system actually gives you 2 awards each year. I've looked at both and they look identical when I look at the certificates.

On ‎11‎/‎5‎/‎2018 at 4:55 PM, conklescoins said:

I believe if they are not letting PCGS coins in, them the ones grandfathered in should have a point value of zero. It’s not fair to folks who are new to the registry and have all NGC graded coins and are trying to compete with an inferior product. I added my 1994 silver proof set NGC PF69UCAM set to the registry and am only ranked #43 but yet ALL my coins are graded by “superior” company and the set that is ranked #1 only has 2 coins graded by NGC. 

I think it's nice that, for 6 (probably soon to be 7 now) NGC has given NGC best in category and overall best in category awards. I think that rather nicely addresses your complaint.

I've been away from this for a long time. I was unemployed through most of 2016/2017 so I wasn't actively collecting and I was happy enough to just not be selling. So I haven't been at all aware of this change. Fortunately I haven't been buying much lately so it's not going to bite me much.

When NGC chose to exclude PCGS from the world sets a few years ago all the existing PCGS coins were booted.

There's a certain amount of inherent subjectivity in grading, which is a big part of the reason why NGC / PCGS make 3 graders look at and offer an opinion on a coin blind to the opinion of the others and look for consensus. CAC is just adding another opinion to that consensus, or not.

I can see the potential "value" in it if you're buying very high value coins, you have next to no confidence in your own grading ability or next to know knowledge about what you're collecting and you're buying the coin as some kind of "investment." I think if you're doing that there are some other, more fundamental, problems with that financial / investment plan, but that's just my 2 cents. I have never really seen my collection as an investment but I know some do and some like to encourage this.

I don't have a single CAC stickered coin in my collection. Not because I'm opposed to it but because I simply don't care, and I don't see a lot of coins in the series I collect that are stickered - probably because I don't own any coins that are valued at more than $10,000, or even $1,000.

I'm mostly in the same position in that I've been shopping the possibility of getting a 1924 Saint for my grandmother's birthyear. I definitely agree that there's quite a jump from an MS64 to an M65 that I'm also having a hard time justifying personally.

I don't know what the CAC sticker is going to do for you given that the market seems to be pretty accepting of that bit of rubbing at the knee so I'd imagine CAC would also stamp such a coin since it was graded consistent with what PCGS / NGC say the grade should be in their guidelines.

I'm normally fine with purchasing coins through dealers online but this is definitely one purchase I'm going to be trying to make in person.

Hi Tim:

 

We made a couple of changes to the display of Custom Sets last week. Now the Owner Comments are shown in the main list view of your Set. I hope this will allow you to display information in the way that you want.

 

We looked at hundreds and hundreds of sets before we elected to merge the information in Slot Comments into Owner Comments. It turns out that very few members were using both fields, and almost always a coin description was put into the Slot Comment field. I don’t have the exact stats with me but it was something like fewer then 10% of all Signature Sets had both fields occupied, and fewer than 5% of the actual slots.

 

If there is a particular way you’d like to show your Sets, let me know by PM or posting here. We’ll try to figure out a way to a make this work for you.

 

Regards,

Scott

 

I was part of that 10%... And used both on almost every slot. I put months into perfecting that set up and, as if the comment combination wasn't bad enough, your change to display the comments on the main view has ruined the appearance of my set.

Before, I could have a simple, short slot comment about what the coin was/why it was distinctive, and a long, elaborate informative owner's comment without having the long commentary show up on the main view. Now, the entire text shows up in the main page. The narrow column width makes the comments stretch on forever. The set can't even be easily viewed and appreciated as a whole now.

I would have preferred it that the comments weren't visible from the main view as they were before, but hey, I guess this is what I get for having a life and needing to be gone for a few months.

You obviously can't make everyone happy, but at least the old system came pretty close.

It's also "nice" to see that I'll pretty much have to re-build the entire set from the begining in order make it work properly because of this transition.

Oh yeah. that's a regular old toner, that nickel is.

I purchased the following last night after the seller brought the price down $25.

Dude! Overkill much? I think that slot is filled!

I decided to pick this up yester day. First coin purchase in 3 months. I think I got a fair deal on it for being an MS65 morgan.

I just picked this up because I thought it looked nice and I felt there wasn't much downside to the purchase. 1922B Switzerland 10F in NGC MS66. Current gold melt value is about $100. I got the coin for $150 - $7.50 for a coupon.