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Message:: [QUOTE="Suarez, post: 3969009, member: 99239"]I think a lot of you are falling into the trap of thinking that 'how it looks like in hand' is some sort of static, visual "truth". It's often said that photos lie but the eye does too. Take your coin and look at it under fluorescent light and then in natural light and your brain delivers the illusion that they look the same when you can easily tell they don't. Consider also that when you look at a coin typically you move your hand in the light creating a mental composite of the coin's appearance. A photograph can't tell you much about the nature of its reflectivity or, for most people, even its true color gamut. Even if the coin shot was perfectly color balanced chances are you'd still see it in your crappy, color un-calibrated Costco monitor making the effort pointless. As for CNG, their photos are heavily post-processed and while I personally like the effect - especially in silver - it isn't without its drawbacks. In my opinion the algorithm used results in some loss of detail which posterizes the images to a subtle degree. Again, the effect can be pleasing but on some coins you could get a "romanticized" version that doesn't look very lifelike. Here's two examples that were taken side by side at CNG about ten years ago (top one is CNG's, bottom mine) using the same lighting but different cameras and post-processing algorithms. Rasiel  [ATTACH=full]1044374[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]1044375[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]