The PCGS Coin Sniffer

Probably not.

The point where the majority of older, gradeable coins had already been slabbed was reached some time ago. The accuracy of this statement is confirmed by several things. First and foremost of those would be the major switch made by NGC back around 2001-02. Prior to that date NGC would not grade any coin minted past 1964. It was also about that time that moderns began being submitted to PCGS in huge numbers.

Back then, NGC was grading about 75,000 coins a month and PCGS about 90,000 a month. Today, PCGS does about 140,000 a month and NGC about 150,000 a month. That's a huge increase in only 8 or 9 years. But the majority of those coins are moderns and bullion coins. And we have a total of approximatley 125 million coins in NGC and PCGS slabs combined.

There was also a study done and published in Coin World back in 2002 (if memory serves) where they figured out an approximation of how many coins were being graded more than once. Back then the study concluded that 20% was a conservative number. Since then, resubmitting coins in the hope of an upgrade has much more prevalent than it ever was. This is partly due to changes on grading standards and partly due to more and more people trying to get in on the upgrade bandwagon.

Also consider, experts agree that of all the raw coins left out there 80% or more of them are problem coins that will never be slabbed in regular slabs. And of course in just past couple of years NGC and PCGS both have started slabbing problem coins, but placing either in Genuine slabs or Detail slabs. And this was after 20 years of promising that they would never, ever, do that.

Then also consider, that PCGS does not put every coin submitted to them into the Coin Sniffer. They only use the Sniffer on coins submitted under the Secure Plus grading tier. All other coins are stil graded by hand and eye just like they always were. So that means that only a tiny percentage of their total submissions would even stand a chance of being rejected.

And, there are also the coins that are being submitted yet again, for perhaps the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or even 5th times in their lives

Thus the Sniffer actually helps increase the number of submissions.

All of these things point to the fact that the majority of all problem free, older coins were already in slabs approximately 8 or 9 years ago. That is of course considering US coins only. There are still many, many millions of world coins out there yet to be slabbed.

So I don't think the Sniffer will have any but the smallest effect on reducing submissions to NGC (NGC has its own sniffer too ya know) and PCGS.

 

You're right, I screwed up on that number

What I should have said was 45 million, PCGS claims over 20 million and NGC now claims 25 million, or so I have read.

 

What makes you think this ?

I mean I understand about the info being passed on to the graders, but if the substances were acceptable why bother looking for them to begin with ?

 

Your choice of course, but what do you do when then is something harmful on the coin - just leave it there ?

Here's the thing. If coins were never properly cleaned then we wouldn't have about 80-90% of all the wonderful coins that we do have. The only reason they still exist is because someone has used proper cleaning on them over the years.