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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Tom B, post: 908013, member: 11854&quot;]I wanted to touch upon what both Paul and Carl have written.&nbsp; </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Paul has taken up the statements regarding the internet and quality digital photography that I have been making for at least five years.&nbsp; Many folks wonder why they hadn&#039;t seen wonderfully toned coins in as great a quantity in the 1970s, 1980s or early 1990s and the answer is largely do to the internet and quality digital photography.&nbsp; Prior to the advent of these two items the only way a typical collector or dealer would have access to wonderfully toned coins would be to know someone who specialized in them and then to meet up with that person at a show or a shop while the person had the coins in-hand.&nbsp; This just didn&#039;t happen very often and doesn&#039;t happen very often today, either.&nbsp; However, the ability for serious students of photography to take quality digital images exploded in the late 1990s and early 2000s and this made sharing images of such coins trivial since the internet had already largely broken through in the mid-1990s and ebay, many coin auction sites and coin boards as we know them today were established in the late 1990s and early 2000s.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>To put this into perspective, think about two things.&nbsp; The first is to think about how many wonderfully toned coins you see <i>in-hand </i> when you meet up with folks at shows or shops vs how many quality digital images you see on the internet.&nbsp; I would venture to say that most folks see <i>far more </i> wonderfully toned coins via the internet than they do in-hand.&nbsp; The second is to think about how many sports highlights, new stories, oddball videos, auctions of all types or anything else of interest you can immediately access via the internet vs how long it would take to find all those items at your local library only fifteen years ago.&nbsp; There is no comparison; the volume of information and ease of access is so much greater today that nearly anything you want to see, read or hear is at your fingertips within seconds today vs perhaps not being available at any price only fifteen years ago.&nbsp; This can serve to skew how &quot;common&quot; wonderfully toned coins appear to be on coin boards.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Carl&#039;s comments about heating coins to make AT examples or of other methods certainly holds water in the sense that folks have <i>always been fooled </i> when they are in deeper than their knowledge.&nbsp; This has historically included altered date and mintmark coinage, counterfeits, dipped coins, recolored coins, repaired coins, the ability to accurately grade coins and AT.&nbsp; Fortunately, with the advent of mostly reliable TPG grading (currently NGC and PCGS) most collectors and dealers need know little about all of these factors.&nbsp; Sadly, it is my experience that most collectors and quite a few dealers are ignorant of most aspects of the hobby-industry.&nbsp; As always, if one is well informed and reasonably careful then the mistakes are much more rare and the return from the hobby-industry is much greater.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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