I bought this coin from a dealers website this past Sunday and was very excited to get it in hand. However, when I received it today I was very let down. As you can see the online images were way over saturated and the coin is really pretty dull and uninspiring. These are the dealers images: and this is what the coin ACTUALLY looks like: Now I have to waste my shipping materials to send it back!
Sometimes it's an advantage when the slab can be seen in the pictures. Looking at the label, it's usually quite easy to tell if the pics were juiced or not... this works at least for me.
I haven't checked yet, but it's a pretty major dealer so I'm assuming it will be something along the lines of a no questions asked return policy.
The only difference is, he employed lighting capable of bringing out the coin's color and you did not. If you physically looked at it under the same lighting with which they shot it, you would see that color. The images were not "juiced." Further, toning on silver follows a known progression of colors, and one who knows that color progression would be immediately aware the coin was in final-stage toning and would be pretty dark unless appropriately lit. When you see black in coin images lit appropriately for toning, run. The coin will be nearly all black. I'm sorry you're disappointed, and sincerely hope they accept your return, but this happened solely because of your incomplete knowledge of coin photography and toning progression. Hopefully they accept the return, and you will have paid nothing for this valuable lesson.
No. Those colors in the sellers photos aren't on the coin. I even turned the saturation up as far as possible on my image editing program and it still didn't look close to the sellers images. I have the coin in hand you don't so don't say if I had the coin under bright enough lights the colors would magicly appear. I had it under two very bright lights and what is in the pictures is what was there. Who would want a toned coin where you have to view it under a 50,000 watt light to see the color anyways?
All you're doing is proving my points. You don't know how to light a coin to bring out whatever color is there - "bright lights" don't do it - and you don't know that end-stage toning shows no color unless lit perfectly. Nobody. That's the point.
I hate sellers who do this , to me it's a kin to bait and switch . Hope he has to eat the return postage .
Superdave is correct as usual. If you know the progression changes the sellers pics scream terminal stage "dark coin". Go to heritage and look at toned morgan proofs. A lot of them are dark but seem to have color that pops. Well that color can only be seen at the right angle under the right light. In hand they're dark with only hints of color. Let us know how the return goes
I also agree with SuperDave. Dark coins can be imaged in many ways. It's all about lighting. It gets really fun with dark proofs.
I don't want to seem like I'm attacking the OP; far from it. It's the exact same thing as grading - if you're going to buy coins for grade, you really ought to be able to grade. If you're going to buy toned coins, you really ought to know how toning happens and what it looks like in images. And when folks show up with overgraded coins they've purchased, we help them to understand where they went wrong so they don't repeat the mistake. I'm not particularly happy with the seller for presenting an end-stage toner like this, but unlike an overgraded AU coin which will never be MS64 again, anyone with the right camera and lighting can duplicate the look the seller presented with that coin.
Yes they are. And I have tried to explain this a hundred times on the forum - the only way to "see" those colors, is to look at that coin under a light at one very specific angle. View it from any other angle and you will not see those colors. This is true of I'd say 90% of all colorfully toned coins. This coin pictured below is one that I often use to illustrate this. I took both pictures using the same camera, the same camera settings, the same lights, and on the same day. The only thing I changed for the two different pictures were the angles of the camera to the coin and lights to the coin. And that change in angle was maybe 1 or 2 degrees - that's all. And yet look at the difference. Now to show you even more of a difference, here is a picture of the entire set in its original holder. You won't see hardly any toning at all in it. The half crown is the top left coin. That coin of yours is from a 1957 Mint Set, and that type of toning is rather common on the coins from those sets. The 1958 sets are the ones that are best known for having the most colorful toning, the rest of the dates often end up looking like your coin. But there are exceptions of course. Here's one from '55, you'll see the similarity -
Agree. I was looking at some NGC toners on eBay. The photos looked "nice". Luckily, NGC had their own photos of the coin when I looked up the cert. After viewing the NGC photo, I got a better feel for the coin and decided to pass on buying any of them.
...And this is why I think all online coin retailers who claim "toning" on their coins, or "booming luster" need to include a video of their "toned" coins being tilted on a tilt stage to complement their still images of the coin. The "sweet spot" angle, and how that angle is achieved, would be revealed by the video. This is the closest to experiencing the coin in-hand that an online buyer could possibly hope for (assuming that the lighting and photography is up to par).
The coin in my avatar has some amazing colors, but they also only come out under certain lighting angles. Honestly, I thought your coin was kinda ugly even in the seller pics, but I do not think he did anything wrong. Just return it.
That is disappointing, yes. I don't think the images are juiced, but they do show the most optimistic view of the coin. Your in-hand photos show *classic* '57 mint set toning. They almost always have that darker greenish shade of blue, rather than the bright blue in the sellers pics. Whenever I see '57 coins with those blues, I just assume it will be darker in hand.
As a general rule, videos of coins suck. People send me video's all the time asking me to look at them. And before we could actually post videos of coins here on the forum I used to think how wonderful it would be to be able to do that, that doing that would allow people to see all those things they can't see in pictures. Exactly the kind of thing you're talking about. That was until I tried making some coin videos of my own. Then I discovered reality - that coin videos suck. Oh sure you can take a video of a coin and show how the luster rolls around the coin. But try, just try, to roll a coin under a light so that you only move it 1 or 2 degrees, in any of the 3 axes. You can't do it. And that's what it takes to be able to capture that one special angle.
