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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 150713, member: 66&quot;]Bruce, I hate to tell you this but I am probably the WORST person to ask that question of.&nbsp; I hate ALL of the grading services and not a single coin in my collection is slabbed.&nbsp; I will not buy a slabbed coin and break it out so that it is raw.&nbsp; I am so anti-slab that I will not even look at slabbed coins when I am seeking coins for my collection.&nbsp; If&nbsp; I am at a show and looking for coins for my collection and I look in a dealer case and just see slabs, I just move on to the next table.</p><p><br /></p><p>My slab collection is rather extensive, but I have never paid much attention to the coins that are in those slabs.&nbsp; They are of no importance to me.&nbsp; For the slab reference set the only thing that matters is the slab itself not what it contains.&nbsp; In some cases some of the slabs I need would be much more easily and cheaply acquired by simply submitting coins to have them put in the slabs.&nbsp; But I do not want to have anything to do with directly contributing to them so I won&#039;t do submissions either.</p><p><br /></p><p>I do have a few personal opinions about some of the grading services, but I won&#039;t normally discuss them because they are not complimentry I am at least somewhat dependant on the services for the information I receive on their products and If I start venting some of those opinions some of my information sources may dry up.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now if you want to know about certification services that would be another matter.&nbsp; (certification and grading are NOT the same thing.)&nbsp; I do approve of them.&nbsp; Unfortunately for the most part they are all gone now.&nbsp; No one really cares today about certification (Guaranteed identification and authentication), all they care about is the grade, how much they can sell it for, and whether or not they might be able to get it to grade even higher if they paid the service again.&nbsp; (In my opinion todays services do not do certification.&nbsp; They often don&#039;t do proper identification and they DON&#039;T authenticate other than a quick glance &quot;It looks good to me.&quot; .&nbsp; They don&#039;t do any testing unless there is something blatently odd going on.)</p><p><br /></p><p>The best of the certification services was probably ANAAB which was the direct decendant of the original ANACS.&nbsp; Both of those services identified the coin, weighed them, measured them, did specific gravity tests, photograghed them, for rarer pieces did comparisons against the photo files of the known genuine dies and/or the known fakes.&nbsp; (The ANA has hundreds of thousands of photos of coins to show the features of the different known dies, and of the known fakes.&nbsp; When the ANA sold ANACS to Amos Press, they kept the photofiles and then later used them with ANAAB.)&nbsp; The had a large number of outside consultants who were experts in their series that they could and did send the pieces to for verification.&nbsp; When the coins came back they were CERTIFIED.&nbsp; If there was ANY question they were bagged.&nbsp; Of course ANACS certification began dying when grading began and was finished off with beginning of slabbing and the sale of the company.&nbsp; ANAAB was born about a year later but the ANA never bothered to advertise the company, or promote it in any substantial way.&nbsp; Nor did they provide adiquate funding or staff.&nbsp; Even so it managed to limp alongfor ten years.&nbsp; I rank it highly because they moved the certification into many more areas than ANACS had and handled much more non-mainstream material.</p><p><br /></p><p>About the only company still doing certification is ACCS Ancient Coin Certification Service, and as the name says they only do ancients.&nbsp; But you do get the whole workup and by one of the top people in the field.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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