Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;PaddyB, post: 2996798, member: 40017&quot;]That&#039;s a short question that opens up one of those never ending debates!</p><p><br /></p><p>I think the short answer is to do with the coins we have to grade. In the US they only have a couple of hundred years of their own coins to assess and a lot of collectors are focused on pretty modern stuff, so being able to distinguish the finer points of Uncirculated and Mint State coins became important. In the UK we have 2000 years of coins to work with, the majority of which would never be found even close to uncirculated so our emphasis has been on Fine/VF and EF coins. If a coin was good enough to be graded Uncirculated any finer differentiation seemed irrelevant.</p><p>The Sheldon system for coin grading started in the US in 1949 (with later adaptations). See: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_coin_grading_scale" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_coin_grading_scale" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_coin_grading_scale</a></p><p>There have been attempts to introduce a more precise 100 point system in the UK, with mixed reactions. Other coin fora have endless debates back and forth on the relative merits of different systems and also the reliability or otherwise of the different grading houses.</p><p>The whole grading situation is made much more difficult by the general vast over-grading of coins by non-experts (and some unscrupulous experts) on Ebay and other sites.</p><p>I collect mainly British coins for myself and do not get them graded or encapsulated, so the simple old UK system suits me fine. I am no expert on grading but try to be fairly strict. You should always get more opinions and hopefully some others will chip in here.</p><p>BTW I am now in North Devon, so if you are passing through from Cornwall, let me know![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in