What would cause these lines on a 1880-S PL Morgan?

Over polished dies? What could it grade based on the photos provided? Yes, tough to tell. I'd guess MS65PL.




Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

A few of them look like they cross the devices. That bothers me because they could be hairlines from polishing the coin. It's hard for me to tell without the coin in hand. I find that examining the coin under a halogen light works best for spotting hairlines.

Chris

 

It looks cleaned/polished, and even if not for those lines, no way it's PL... I'd say MS63, but cleaned, so Details MS60 cleaned.

 

The OP is not telling us the whole story. Do you have the coin in-hand, or are these seller pics? Is the coin in some sort of holder or slab? It looks like it is not raw. The scratches look like those one a slab that happened to come in and photobomb a coin photo. The photos also look juiced to give the appearance of PL, so be careful.

And, for the record, the presence of a few scattered hairlines does NOT necessarily mean that the coin has been cleaned. That is a common misconception in online forums like this. This coin absolutely does not have the appearance of a cleaned coin.

 

Before the advent of the "Details Grade" at NGC, I used to own an 1883-CC that had the same characteristics in photos. I thought it would grade DMPL. When I submitted it for grading, it was body bagged for the hairlines. I couldn't even see them. Another collector on the NGC forums suggested that I examine it under a halogen lamp. Sure enough! There they were!

Chris

 

Insufficient information in these two images to make more than a wild guess as to grade, and not at all regarding reflectivity. Yes, when images with one technique, a deeply reflective coin will look like this. However, a nice lustrous (non-reflective) coin won't look much different when imaged in the same fashion.

This coin was images with two raw lights at 10:00 and 2:00 (roughly) - the appropriate place to locate two-light sets - but the photographer used lights of two different color temperatures. See how the two "bright" axes on the reverse are two different colors? One bluish, one yellowish, and that proves both two different lighting color temps, and poor White Balance correction (neither light color was corrected, not that I blame the camera for failing). And without diffusion, the areas away from those two bright axes are literally in the dark, not registering sufficiently on the camera sensor to communicate any detail. You literally cannot tell what the deepest recesses of those areas - call it from 8:00-2:00 and 11:00-5:00 - are hiding for marks, because the camera sensor likely didn't "see" them in enough detail to record data.

I'm being pessimistic, it's probably a beautiful coin, but half of buying coins from images is knowing how to evaluate the images themselves. And it's very, very difficult to learn both evaluating coins and evaluating images at the same time. The evidence is often contradictory.

 

This is my only 80-S I have even close to that one.



My hand wasn't steady on the first photo.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk