No more complaining about GC photos? Phil Arnold Joins GreatCollections

One weird thing I have noticed as GC transitions from their "old" photo setup to eventually getting the "great photo" added to most of their auctions, that some of their slab photo quality are getting worse.

By worse I mean, they are exposing for the overall picture / exposing for the slab, which means the Slab itself looks correct and is not over-exposed, but this has the major downside of making the coin appear darker, and you can see the coin itself less well for hits, scrapes, scratches, etc.

Since they are in transition, you can see coins showing up side-by-side in auctions that end on the same date, and one coin has the old, slightly overexposed images that shows the coin nicely, right next to a better exposed image that shows the slab better than the coin.

example:



The end goal of for GC is to get ALL their auctions to have the Great Photo (3rd photo) for each auction, which gives us buyers a high resolution closeup akin to PCGS TrueView.

In the meantime, we are sort of in a place that I think the full slab shots are slightly worse than GC photos in the past, but hopefully this only a temporary problem.

The real bummer is that I have seen a few examples of the darker slab shots (new) but that also do not have the 3rd photo (yet). On small coins especially, that makes it harder to judge the coin.



A secondary issue I have been seeing and more JUNK on the slabs. Its like GC is suddenly not even cleaning very obvious and nasty glue, spills, tape, etc. off the slab when in the past, they must have done some level of slab hygiene in the past of this, as I noticing this problem on a lot more slaps in the past few weeks than the past 10+ years of bidding. Not the end of the world, but an interesting unexpected symptom of perhaps their recent building move, their massive growth, their new photo offerings, or something else.

Examples (click to make big):

 

I thought this was cool, a GC auction with 4 photos. (not showing the slab pics)

On the proofs, looks like they might get in the habit of showing the cameo vs the color, which will be very helpful for potential buyers:

This better represents the coin, and more auction companies should do this.

 

Yup, I'm loving the photos. I really like it when I can double-dip on GreatPhoto and TrueViews.

Here are some of my new coins that have Both.