Training The Eyes

I totally agree, because some things can be quantified. But there also has to be some things, like eye appeal, that eventually move a collector to buy the coin, that can't be measured.

 

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Doug has simplified the question by breaking it down to two parts.

GDJMSP, posted: "Randy I think there's 2 questions in your original post. 1 - how does one avoid missing things on coins ? And 2 - how does one train his/her eyes. Now I'll grant you that the 2nd can be and probably often is done in order to accomplish the 1st - but I see them as two different things. I also think the 1st is much easier than the 2nd.


I'll condense what followed. Train yourself to examine every part of a coin by breaking it down into sections. Lines, circles or quadrants. while doing this, TIP AND ROTATE THE COIN AT THE SAME TIME in good light.

"Anyhow, don't look at the coin as a whole until you get all this completed. Along the way you'll pick up any and all flaws because you're only focusing on tiny little pieces. And so when you look at the coin as a whole, all of this will come back to you collate into the whole."

"Training the eyes, as I said that's a different thing to me because what you're doing is really training your brain - your eyes are just the tools that allow your brain to do everything else. But to train your brain to recognize things when you see them you must first acquire a good bit of knowledge, about many different things. Because if it's something you haven't seen before or don't know what it is then you simply aint gonna see it ! Your eyes'll go right past it not even realizing it's there. And that's what makes this the hard part. There's hundreds of things about coins and you have to know what each and every one looks like, and how they vary, why they vary, even if they can vary - but almost everything can, stress almost. Some things simply can't, don't and won't. It's the acquisition of the knowledge that is the real training - not the training if the eyes. Your eyes'll see it automatically, once you know what it is you're looking at - what your eyes are seeing.

Once your eyes/brain are/is trained you'll be see things at a glance that you never saw before. This is why people who really know how to grade can grade a coin, accurately and correctly, in 5 or 6 seconds while the average person is gonna spend minutes maybe tens of minutes, grading a coin. And because they can't do it in mere seconds, and they believe they do know how to grade a coin, they doubt the ability of somebody else to do it."

TRAINING your eyes:

Your eyes! That is the rub. All of us see differently. If your eyesight is bad, if you are color blind, if you are far-sighted and don't have glasses for close work you start off with a very huge handicap! I'm a detail guy, it's in my nature. I am lucky to be nearsighted so I see things close up before adding magnification. I believe the way I became both nearsighted and "trained" (LOL) to see detail happened as a very young child tracing the lines from coloring books! I couldn't stand to be even a tiny amount "off." I was also able to take a pointed pencil and print so tiny that few could read what I wrote w/o using a magnifying glass! Besides being detail oriented, the other thing that has helped me the most was the luxury of examining coins using a 7X - 80X Nikon stereo microscope for over forty years. Most work done at 7X. Any more discussion of magnification here is off topic except to say if you've seen/learned what a characteristic on a coin is up close, you usually know what it is on another coin with your unaided eyes.

I know folks WITH GOOD EYES can train themselves to become more detailed. Take your time and examine even your pocket change. Playing those newspaper quizzes where two images are printed and you need to find the differences is also great training to look for details.

Finally, once you learn to look for tiny flaws on your coins, you'll need to learn when to "back-off." Commercial grading is based on the over-all eye appeal of a coin not its true condition! Just a little more added subjectivity!

 

She could do better.... so go ahead....Just saying.
JK. Insider.

 

This idea of training your eyes is like what I had to do as an airport security screener running the x-ray machines. Only we called it building a library of images in our heads of familiar objects. Some of us were better at it than others, and newbies often had to be shown that what they thought was a threat really wasn't. When that happened, it helped them to see what was found so they could add it to their "library" of images. The same thing would apply to coins, and the photos here, along with the commentary, helps us all to build that library!