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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cladking, post: 357458, member: 68&quot;]I&#039;m not sure what they did before 1965 as I don&#039;t have a lot of experience with these.&nbsp; They tend to be better coins than what&#039;s seen in circulation but they average about the same as the better coins made for circulation.&nbsp; After 1964 they improved quality of these dramatically.&nbsp; They are nearly all up to the SMS standards except they are made with normal dies rather than dies which have gone through the steps to be proofs as were the SMS dies.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;s not primarily the higher pressure and lower striking speeds that mean these are very high quality; it&#039;s primarily the fact that dies are swapped out after the first sign of wear.&nbsp; Circulation issues can be extremely hard to find in very early die state but many mint set coins are, and the rest are early die state.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>A great deal changes from year to year and over time with the details of mint set production and distribution.&nbsp; For example in 1986 they began using a lot of burnished and partially burnished planchets which give the coins a more PL appearance.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>It was in 2005 that they started chrome plating the dies which give the coins a &quot;satin finish&quot; appearance.&nbsp; There were no other major changes that year except, perhaps, they were able to erradicate some more of the marking that most of these coins display.&nbsp; Quailty still tends to vary a lot for these coins from one year to another and from mint to mint.&nbsp; There is less variation among the denominations in most years.&nbsp; But every coin in every mint set is unique and will lay out in a very wide range and most examples will usually be clustered somewhere along that range.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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