Featured Can you define artificial toning ?

Discussion in 'US Coins Forum' started by GDJMSP, Nov 12, 2018.

  1. V. Kurt Bellman

    V. Kurt Bellman Yes, I'm blunt! Get over your "feeeeelings".

    So now I learn I’m not cynical ENOUGH. :rolleyes:
     
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  3. V. Kurt Bellman

    V. Kurt Bellman Yes, I'm blunt! Get over your "feeeeelings".

    I’m not quite sure if I find your confidence in the Internet to be more amusing or alarming. Suffice it to say it is both and I do not even BEGIN to share it.

    The Internet is the biggest BS delivery system in the history of the planet. Turn on ANY news broadcast. It’s the biggest story of the year. MISinformation is the Internet’s stock in trade.
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2018
  4. -jeffB

    -jeffB Greshams LEO Supporter

    Gotcha. So you aren't saying that color progressions on coins, or their prevalence, have changed; you're saying that the images of those coins have changed, because printed photos have a different gamut from photos displayed on screens (and colors are mapped somewhat differently within the bounds of those gamuts).

    I'd go even a bit further, and point out that the coins themselves in-hand are likely to look different under "modern" LED or fluorescent lighting, as opposed to incandescent light. It's not just color temperature; LED white lamps tend to have a notch, sometimes substantial, in the green, and non-specialty fluorescents have notches all over the place. (So does sunlight, but those notches aren't so deep or wide, and don't matter much.)

    And Sharp is flogging four-color displays, but They're Doing It Wrong, and the market isn't buying it.

    And there are a lucky few "anti-color-blind" people whose eyes have four or more distinct types of color receptors, but we pretend they don't exist. Sure wish one of them would get seriously interested in toners.
     
  5. V. Kurt Bellman

    V. Kurt Bellman Yes, I'm blunt! Get over your "feeeeelings".

    Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m also saying trusting self-appointed experts in this field is ridiculous on stilts.
     
  6. V. Kurt Bellman

    V. Kurt Bellman Yes, I'm blunt! Get over your "feeeeelings".

    As for Lehigh’s last paragraph invective, yes, I do very much take the academic’s approach, the Socratic academic’s to be precise. What a lovely compliment of you to recognize it! Again, not a random choice, quite intentional.

    And yes, I WILL EVERY TIME take the word of honorees of the country’s premier numismatic education organization over some anonymous net denizen. Every day and twice on, heck, EVERY DAY THRICE!

    So should everyone. The logo is the Lamp of Knowledge, not the Purse of Turning a Buck, or the Bulldozer of Building One’s Collection.
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2018
  7. Lehigh96

    Lehigh96 Toning Enthusiast

    If Bob Campbell called that coin AT, the only effect is that it would severely damage his own reputation. There are only two reasons to artificially tone a coin. The first is to cover problems on an already valuable coin, thereby making it more valuable. There is no real downside, since the coin is already a problem coin via cleaning etc. The second reason is to impart beautiful rainbow toning in an attempt to obtain a premium price for the superior eye appeal of the coin. Coin doctors typically choose common coins that have very little numismatic value without the toning in order to mitigate their risk. The coin in question, which is usually referred to as "the moose" was a high grade premium gem Morgan Dollar with clean surfaces and booming luster and significant numismatic value. Calling the moose AT would mean that a coin doctor chose the best Morgan Dollar he could find and then successfully replicated bag toning in the most dramatic way possible with not one indicator of AT all while risking hundreds of dollars if he had failed. That story is entirely implausible.

    Earlier I stated that Bob Campbell's decades old assertion that all green toning is artificial is demonstrably false. There are thousands of bag toned Morgan Dollars with some level of green toning. Are they all AT? What about the the ones that are documented coming from sealed bags, such as those from the Battle Creek hoard?

    1886 Morgan Dollar NGC MS64* Battle Creek "Pink Eye Dollar"

    [​IMG]


    How about coins from the 1957-58 mint sets that are well documented to generate rainbow toning. Are all of those with green toning artificial as well?

    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]


    In 1997, when Bob supposedly made that statement, it was at best hyperbolic. Today, with all the new information we have about toned coins, it is demonstrably false.
     
  8. V. Kurt Bellman

    V. Kurt Bellman Yes, I'm blunt! Get over your "feeeeelings".

    100% agree. So if Bob the Magnificent and Infallible (as if..) can be so demonstrably wrong, why should I trust ANYONE? And I don't.
     
  9. Lehigh96

    Lehigh96 Toning Enthusiast

    The essence of coin collecting is "collecting". In order to collect, you must at least buy, and most people need to buy and sell. To cast either of those things in a negative light is to chastise the entire hobby.

    To hold your affiliation with what I consider a bureaucratic and insignificant organization paramount, while dismissing the actual hobby of coin collecting as a seedy afterthought is hubris personified.

    So while I hold the opinion of "to each their own" view of our hobby, you clearly respond with the I do it this way and "so should everyone" attitude.
     
  10. V. Kurt Bellman

    V. Kurt Bellman Yes, I'm blunt! Get over your "feeeeelings".

    Yup. Absolutely. The only remaining question is, "Why the heck doesn't everybody take that view?"
     
    Pickin and Grinin likes this.
  11. V. Kurt Bellman

    V. Kurt Bellman Yes, I'm blunt! Get over your "feeeeelings".

    Yes I do. Thanks for noticing. By the way, collecting is NOT numismatics; STUDYING is. Raw accumulating is unbelievably crass and ugly.
     
  12. Lehigh96

    Lehigh96 Toning Enthusiast

    You aren't looking for trust, you are looking for infallibility. Trust can be earned simply by engaging with a person over the course of time on the internet. If based on your experience, you determine that they are honest and forthcoming, you can trust them. Nobody is infallible, and as both Doug and I have pointed out, the originality of toning is a guessing game, even for the experts, both those credentialed and otherwise.
     
  13. V. Kurt Bellman

    V. Kurt Bellman Yes, I'm blunt! Get over your "feeeeelings".

    That might be the most utterly stupid sentence I have ever read in my entire life.

    Look, I've been online for almost 30 years, with 20+ on coins.

    My experience: It's a 90/10 situation:

    90% of the people I've interacted with online are insufferable jerks. 10% are just fine.

    90% of the people I've interacted with at ANA national shows are really great people. 10% are jerks.

    Now why do I choose to do what I do? Hmm.
     
  14. Lehigh96

    Lehigh96 Toning Enthusiast

    I was pretty careful not to mention the word numismatics in that paragraph. But if all you really care about is the study of coins, why does it bother you so much how others "collect?"
     
  15. Lehigh96

    Lehigh96 Toning Enthusiast

    Why is that? What would you need to trust someone, other than their words?
     
  16. V. Kurt Bellman

    V. Kurt Bellman Yes, I'm blunt! Get over your "feeeeelings".

    Eye them directly, person to person, evaluate their actions, their mannerisms, their ethics. Non-verbal "tells". Not so easy online.

    By the way, at every WSOP event that I've seen, the final table usually comes down to the usual suspects, and one flash in the pan net player. Yes, they advance nicely, but then hit the wall.
     
  17. HawkeEye

    HawkeEye 1881-O VAMmer

    TypeCoin971793 likes this.
  18. Lehigh96

    Lehigh96 Toning Enthusiast

    As a poker player, non verbal tells are important, but people also have what are called false tells, which muddies the water quite a bit. Looking for patterns in writing style can be just as telling as body language, it is just a different skill set.

    That said, when I said "over the course of time" I was talking about years. That is part of the reason why new members have trouble on internet forums. Nobody knows them, and nobody trusts them, and it takes a long time to develop any sort of trust online, but it can be done.
     
  19. V. Kurt Bellman

    V. Kurt Bellman Yes, I'm blunt! Get over your "feeeeelings".

    Bottom line: If you don't care enough to get out from under your screen and do business in meatspace, you are as irrelevant to me as anyone could ever be.
     
  20. V. Kurt Bellman

    V. Kurt Bellman Yes, I'm blunt! Get over your "feeeeelings".

    But it takes but an instant to ruin all those years. Hey, I get it. For some people "I'll make it good" is just fine with them. It's enough. Well it's not for me. I have a zero-tolerance policy for being messed with. I prefer proactive skepticism and proactive weeding out of creeps. My little Hicksville world provides me MANY MANY multples of all the coins I could ever even THINK of buying, live and in my hand, with my glass, swirling under a light I choose. WHY ON EARTH WOULD I EVER CARE ABOUT DEALING ON THE INTERNET???? And so I do not.

    And incidentally, my collection exceeds 100,000 pieces, right now, today. It is over 1,000 pounds. Most of them I haven't seen in years. A solid sized minority, I haven't looked at in over 10 years. But my books are open nearly every night.
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2018
  21. Lehigh96

    Lehigh96 Toning Enthusiast

    I'm going to the Allentown/Bethlehem Show tomorrow. Aren't you proud of me?
     
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