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Help with question about digital tech.
habs007
Posts: 128 ✭✭✭
We have all been burned buying trimmed vintage cards online. it makes it hard to buy the higher priced raw vintage cards on Ebay and l am sure it keeps sellers from getting higher prices .l know there is a small variance in the size of some of the older vintage cards. My question is with all the tech out there could Ebay not have a computer system that measures the uploaded photo's dimensions and gives you a readout in percent of whether the card has a high or low probability of being trimmed . But with so many different cameras and scanners could it work ?
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I don’t see it happening in an accurate enough way to depend on, and I work in tech so that hurts a little to say. It could potentially confirm the proportion of length and width, but there’s no structure around images to fall back on - some listings have postage stamp sized pictures while others have huge pics. Also, many listings are taken at angles, not head on. Sure, maybe something could be done to say “issue X should have a white/black border no smaller than Y pixels”, but there are plenty of borderless issues out there. There are also some releases that have a known size variance.
I just can’t see a solution based on uploaded images that would be reliable enough to use to block listings, especially when eBay can charge someone for a 3rd party to more definitively make the same determination.
Jim
I worked for a company over 25 years ago that made printed circuit boards. They had a "View Precis" optical inspection machine that you put the part on that would measure literally hundreds of measurements. The dimensions of the item to be inspected were programmed in prior to scanning. The machine would measure vertically, horizontally and also for "depth" (z-axis).
This machine could measure down to at least .003 of an inch, and would certainly let you know some very important measurements of a sports card, including "tilt" if someone trimmed it and didn't do it perfectly. The machine also could provide you of a printout of all the measurements, so a person could look at them before "signing off" on weather the item was acceptable or not.
The tools certainly exist, and have for a long time, however the cost effectiveness might not be there for low dollar cards.
I used the 3000 machine pictured below.
And that is 25 years ago - wow .
Those machines absolutely exist to evaluate a card “in person”, but I can’t imagine a way that eBay can do anything reliable using pictures in a listing beyond the most basic and obvious trimming or perhaps detection of poor fakes.
Jim
Ebay or someone else could also handle it the same way as digital checks. Enter card brand/year and the system would prompt users exactly how to center and where to place card before photo is taken.
Keep in mind cards have historically not been cut to a precise dimension straight from the manufacturers. While this may be better with modern (I honestly have no idea), it certainly would be an issue with cards issued in the 90's or older.