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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;physics-fan3.14, post: 869483, member: 19165&quot;]Yes, #1 is by far my favorite of that posting. Remember, these are opinions based solely on the pair of pictures here and my interpretation of them - which is as we all know a terrible way to try and judge coins like this. #1 appears dark grey, nicely circulated with that &quot;gem cameo circulated&quot; look that I love. The surfaces appear smooth, with the exception of a couple small marks on the obverse and the mark I mentioned on the reverse. The coin also, and quite importantly, appears to have a good strike - which is very difficult to find on these early coins. </p><p><br /></p><p>I prefer #1 over #2 for a few reasons (I&#039;m ignoring the other two because they seem to be cleaned/corroded/damaged to me, and thus not acceptable for my collection). The first of these is, as I already mentioned, the color. While #2 has nice color (and probably looks considerably nicer in hand) I generally prefer the smooth, dark look. As I mentioned in my previous post, it also has the die adjustment marks which #1 lacks. Further, although #2 appears to grade quite a bit higher, it does not appear to be as well struck. </p><p><br /></p><p>Duke, the thing with these coins is that it take a specialist of the series to be able to properly grade them. I am by no means a specialist, I concentrate most of my US studies on the half dollars. A specialist would know exactly which die pairings struck each of these coins - each die pairing has different strike characteristics and must be graded individually. The TPGs are notoriously bad at grading this type of material because they are not specialists. A coin they may call F a specialist may call VF+ because he knows that die pairing is generally very weakly struck and the missing detail is due to strike, not wear. This is just another aspect of the study of strike which I mentioned in my article last week.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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