Reply to Thread

Message:: [QUOTE="SuperDave, post: 2782329, member: 1892"]There are hundreds. Personally, I do most of my buying on Ebay, occasionally at shows and once in a while from a dealer online. It's easy to say "Ebay's OK," but I've shot thousands upon thousands of images of my own coins, and studied who knows how many thousands of other people's images in almost twenty years of lurking that place. Learning the differences between what the camera sees, and what you will see in-hand, can only happen with long experience. Not everybody's a pro-level hand with a camera, and even if their intentions are good their images aren't, really. You have to learn to "read between the lines" with much of it. Worse are those who deliberately doctor their images to make the coin even better, and worse yet those who manipulate the imaging process to present the coin in its' "best light," which is a euphemism for "you're probably not ever going to be able to light the coin well enough to make it look like that." You'll find all of this both on and off Ebay. And even with all my experience, I still get deceived occasionally. Your best, and only, weapon against all this is knowledge. Numismatics is not for those unwilling to go out and develop a level of personal expertise; heck, the whole hobby is about knowledge. It's necessary to learn to grade, first and foremost, and then to learn to grade from images (a completely different skillset) if the plan is to buy from images.[/QUOTE]