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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cladking, post: 24197, member: 68&quot;]It requires some learning for most people to see the difference between two level of proof grades.&nbsp; If you give a novice ten different proofs representing a cross section of proof quality and ask him to arrange them from best to worst he&#039;ll have a lot of trouble.&nbsp; He won&#039;t do it the same way twice.&nbsp; Even after he learns to start spotting the differences there will be some variation over time as his tastes evolve.&nbsp; It took me years to see these differences.&nbsp; While I personally am not extremely interested in these differences there are some people who are and they do sometimes pay very high prices for them.&nbsp; While most of the proofs have vary narrow range in quality there are some dates where this range is much wider (&#039;68-S half for instance), and much less learning is required to spot it.&nbsp; It is true that at the highest end of the range that even professionals can have difficulty telling them apart without a benchmark.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>The range in mint set quality is always much much wider.&nbsp; Frequently the bulk of the mint set coins will be at the lower end of the range, and sometimes they&#039;ll be nearer the middle of the range.&nbsp; In no case are they close to the top of the range.&nbsp; The &#039;72-D quarter is one of the best and it averages a nice MS-64.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Many factors have to come together for the mint to make a gem.&nbsp; Every step from die and planchet preparation to press maintenance and cleaning has to work as it was designed.&nbsp; This is actually an anomaly! One of the biggest things keeping coins from being gems is die condition.&nbsp; After about 40,000 strikes there is always enough wear on the die to assure it will strike no more gems but it will produce up to another half million coins or so.&nbsp; So only fewer than 10% of regular issue coins can even be in contention.&nbsp; Then there is die alignment which will exclude up to 60%, strike pressure- 50%, and marking from handling 75%.&nbsp; There are many other things that can go wrong but you can see how improbable gems are.&nbsp; They do show up in rolls and bags but in almost every case better examples can be found in the mint sets.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Mint set coins are struck by new dies.&nbsp; Quarter dies are swapped out after only about 30,000 strikes.&nbsp; They are struck on the old single presses so die alignment is less of an issue.&nbsp; There are still many things that go wrong with the process so the gems still tend to be flukes, but compared to finding nice looking coins in rolls, finding them in mint sets is like shooting fish in a barrel. </p><p><br /></p><p>Those of us who love the moderns know that mint sets are not the final answer in assembling collections.&nbsp; Many coins were not issued in the mint sets so you have no choice but to look for rolls.&nbsp; Varieties rarely show up in mint sets and here they do appear in the sets tend to be common because mint sets have had only about an 80% attrition where the attrition for uncs on regular issues can be higher than 99.9%.&nbsp; There are also some coins which are excessively rare in mint sets as gems.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>One of the most interesting things about these coins is that so many of them are so difficult to chase down.&nbsp; Even coins that are common in circulation can be very difficult in unc.&nbsp; There are still some 150 million of the &#039;84-D type &quot;d&quot; reverse quarter in circulation but finding an unc will require months of intensive searching.&nbsp; Even nice XF&#039;s of this are getting few and far between.</p><p><br /></p><p>One of the reasons that the atttrition is so high on proof and mint sets is that in most dates are worth more as individual coins than as a set.&nbsp; There doesn&#039;t need to be a gem in a set for it to be profitable to destroy it![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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