I've got a 2003A $1 F02662041*. http://www.mycurrencycollection.com/reference/stars/lookup.php says it's from a run of 3.2M printed in OCTOBER 2005. The "Run Size" is 3200000 but "Total Printed" is10624000. My question is why everyone is so exited when they got a note from a 3.2M when it's not necessarily the only run and "Total Printed" might be much larger?
no one is excited when they get a note with a run of 3.2 mil, thats the highest you can have. people like it when its 320,000.
Well it could be that the note in question is a star note and it might be that such a note could compleat a part of a collection There are a number of reasons that a person could be excited about recieving a note no matter what the run # is, two named above as for other reasons, it could be a error note, there first star note LOL
a print run of 3.2 mil is nothign special. It is not the largest run you can have, but its still a big run. When you see runs of 1.28 mil, folks start to nitice, but dont get all that excited. a print run of 640,000 folks start to gety real excited. print of of 320,000 and folks get down right INSANE!!! For example - below is a print run for June 2007 for the 2006 $1 series for the FW 'F' district start - F 000 00001 A end - F 576 00000 C thats alot of notes.
I am struggling with this. I know small size collectors get excited over small print runs but I have never understood why. The following is a hypothetical. I only used these numbers because they were in Daggarjon's example. A print run of 320,000 would include serial numbers F00000001A through F00320000A. At some later date(s) F00320001A through F96000000A may be printed. Let's say for the sake of this discussion that they have been printed. If there is no difference in the notes except for the serial numbers themselves, why does the date they were printed and the fact that only 320,000 were printed on one day but 95000000+ were printed over the next year make the limited print run "scarce". What I mean is this: why is there a demand for the "short run" since there is no way to differentiate the notes by looking at them and the only difference is some were printed one day and the rest at a later time?
That's what we collectors do - get crazy over something that others do not care about. Let's classify face value collectors: 1. not collectors - paper money are different from other paper things because you can buy something with it. 2. level 1 collectors - get one speciment of every type of note that ocasionally get in your wallet: one pre-1996, one "big face", one colorized... 3. level 2 collectors - get every year of every denomination 4. level 3 collectors - get every year and every district of every denomination (I'm here for now) 5. level 4 collectors - get every year, every district and every facility of every denomination 6. level 5 collectors - get every year, every district, every facility and every run of every denomination As soon as a property of a note can be identified (year, district, facility, run etc) it become an invitation to get one of each kind...
To some of us a star is a star is a star. The lower runs are better, but still how often do you see a star note compared to a non-star?
its all about rarity.. or the misconception thereof but because enough folks want them, it increases the perception that they are worth more then face. And then, because folks think they are worth more then face, they want to collect them as well. And then because you have a ton of folks looking for as many notes as possible of that 320,000 not run, now they ARE scarce and the value truly is more then face.
We need to be careful about terminology, though. Part of the reason some people don't see what's interesting about short runs is that some people aren't understanding the word "run" correctly.... These days, the BEP prints most currency in runs of 200,000 sheets (6,400,000 notes). The $50's and $100's use runs of 100,000 sheets (3,200,000 notes) instead. Stars of all denominations also use the 100,000-sheet standard runs; but with stars, even shorter partial runs are often printed. So in Daggar's example of the Atlanta $1's, the July 2007 serial range he listed isn't a print run. It's actually 39 print runs, each comprising 6,400,000 notes. And if there were 39 runs printed for one district in one month, you can see that collecting an entire series by print runs would be a substantially larger challenge than almost anyone really wants. For example, there were a total of 1215 print runs in the 2003A $1 series, not counting stars and collector-only issues. Star notes, though, are printed in much smaller quantities. That same 2003A $1 series had just 19 star runs printed, a number which far more collectors are willing to put up with. So there's actually a significant minority of collectors who try to obtain one star from each run, rather than just one from each district. Since it's only the star notes that are typically collected by print run, the comparisons some folks have made between regular notes and star notes rather miss the point. Another factor that comes into play is the way the BEP chooses serial numbers when it prints a partial run of star notes. Every star run is assigned a full 3,200,000 serials, even if it doesn't use them all. So if run #1 is only 640,000 notes long, then serials 00640001 through 03200000 will just be skipped, and run #2 will still begin at 03200001. As a result, it's easy to keep track of which print run your note comes from: Any serial between 06400001 and 09600000 is from run #3, for example, no matter how long runs #1 and #2 were. Thus there *is*, in fact, a way to distinguish print runs just by looking at the notes. Okay, so that's why the idea of collecting stars by print run isn't quite as absurd as it might initially sound. But that still doesn't explain why some of the short-run stars have such high catalog values. To understand *that*, you need to know one more quirk of the way the BEP uses star notes. There are two separate inspections of the printed currency when error notes can be removed and replaced by stars. The first inspection takes place right after the serial numbers have been printed, before the sheets are cut; an error sheet caught here will be replaced by a sheet of star notes. The second inspection takes place after the notes have been cut and strapped into 100-note packs; if an error is caught here, the whole pack will be replaced by a pack of 100 star notes. (It's more efficient to throw out 99 good notes along with the error than to slow down the process by undoing the strap to replace just the one bad note.) In practice, far more stars are used during the second inspection than the first, largely because of that 99-to-1 ratio. Therefore, when the BEP needs more full packs of star notes, they usually print up a full run of 3,200,000 stars. But when the BEP needs more replacement *sheets* of star notes, they usually print a shortish partial run of stars, because relatively few replacement sheets will last them a while. The upshot is that star notes from full print runs generally enter circulation in the form of full star packs, many of which are intercepted by bank tellers and sold into the collector market. So these stars are easily obtained from dealers in CU condition. But star notes from short print runs generally enter circulation one or two at a time, sprinkled through innocent-looking packs of regular notes, meaning that far fewer of them are noticed and saved while they're still CU. Thus the rarity of these stars in the collector market is much greater than you'd expect from just looking at the printage numbers, and their prices are correspondingly high. That may not persuade anyone to start collecting this way, but hopefully it at least sheds a bit of light on why the market for these notes looks the way it does....
as usual, thanks for the helpful info numbers! i knew the differance between the print runs as i described it and the actual term as you have, but failed to describe it as such as i thought it would confuse more then help follks, at least the way i would describe it i thought it would But as usual, the depth of knowledge you hold, really shows in your explanations
