Accugrade Photo Certificate - the first I've seen

He did give it a good effort. His book came out in 1984. He put some bucks into having it published. An image just for fun.

 

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What I never understood was he had already been doing slabs for two years, why would he start doing photocertificates? It seems a step backward.

 

Could it have been a cheaper option where the submitter could choose to pay a lower fee if the coin was not slabbed? Or maybe they ran out of plastic temporarily and had to use these? Or even a special option for those that didn't like the idea of having a coin sealed in plastic?

 

At least from a handling perspective, the photocerts were likely more expensive.

Robert Paul discusses this in his recollection from ANACS days. They had to photograph the coin, develop the entire roll and print each of the photos, then file the negatives in glassine sleeves and create the cert from the positive.

I like the idea of an alternative to slabs - they were not widely loved in the beginning. '86 '87 was also the transition for ANACS and they did have overlap.

 

Good point that the photo-certs could be more expensive than a regular slab. However, there were also the slabs that had both the obverse and reverse photos, which would likely have cost even more.

It would be nice if an invoice or advertising with grading prices would surface from that era.

 

Best bet would be to find a local library with back issues from CoinWorld or similar and page through them. Probably only on microfiche, when I talked to CW two years back, they were not available electronically. Our one hope would be if the NNP digitized them, but not likely.

 

COAs free floating of the coin itself are not unlike Monopoly currency. Always been a bit amused and also offended by the 2nd hand velvet US Mint Box COA market. Just smacks of scam for anyone with a handful of capsules. Disgusting. I think it's part of the reason no one takes modern US commemorative silver seriously, that and over-zealous production numbers. 90% Silver Proof Dollars going for melt value is a bit amusing and also sad. The decline of our society's general everyday usage of both paper currency and also coins present what I believe to be a genuine threat to the future of traditional numismatics. Kids will no longer be able to make the real world and or historical connections if you will to these shiny round things, soon to be gone the way of subway tokens perhaps. Not to bum myself out on the 4th of July, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a "Nike at US Mint" Commemorative Basketball Silver Set soon, would you?

 

What does any of this have to do with this thread?

 

Tangential I agree, but it points out that the early system, while extremely informative to me, was flawed in that fraud could easily be commited, whereas the slab approach is a one in all solution, though less impressive visually.
Sorry if that was not a preface to my comment. Some people don't connect ideas well.

 

Always amazed that anytime you say something thoughtful in here in a casual manner, someone will arrogantly try to trash you.

 

/a/ he's not trashing you, he's asking what a COA has to do with a Photo Certificate from a TGP.
/b/ What is the connection you were trying to make? That a Photo Certificate is separate from the coin? Remember except for a pristine coin, the marks on the coin are unique and can easily identify the specific coin. When it comes to truly rare coins, the sketch in 100 year old auction catalogs can be sufficient to identify.

 

That could be an option, but unfortunately my library doesn't keep issues longer than a year or two. Maybe someone on this forum has some old issues and would be interested in doing a bit of research?

 

Yes generic COAs do seem cheesy and are often associated with less than honest TV sellers or magazine ads. However, the example in this thread is not a "COA;" it's a grading certificate that multiple companies (like Anacs, ACG, NCI, INSAB, etc) used before slabbing became more mainstream. It was actually a pretty secure practice since like @Burton Strauss III mentions, it is fairly easy to match the coin to the photo. In this ACG piece that I have posted, there are some very distinctive marks, hits, etc that make the match clearly evident.

 

I'm sorry. I did not mean to trash you.