Pics of $5 Indians.....check out the album.

Meta

I've put together an album on Villagephotos.com of four $5Indians that I will be submitting to PCGS soon. Let me know what you think of them. I never would have guessed that taking pictures of coins would be so damned entertaining! LOTS more to learn. Experiment, experiment, experiment. I still can't get the lighting quite right in some of the shots to make the coin look as nice as it does in person. Right now I am using two little halogen desk lamps with frosted filters (From WALMART!). They cut a lot of the glare and make things a little easier. I still have yet to post the $10 Liberty and Indians to villagephotos, but I will probably get around to it late tonight. You all have been a great help......I might be addicted to this. Hope you enjoy!

LINK-LINK-LINK-LINK

coinlieutenant

Meta,

very nice coins. I love 5$ indians. I just sold a 1929 5$ in a PCGS XF 40 holder that was quite nice...

How do you grade them? The 11 looks UNC, while the 15 and 12 look 58ish, sliders to me. Very hard to tell from the pics. Grading from scans/pics is difficult.

Regardless of how they grade they are nice coins...

John

jom

As far as the pics go get rid of that red cloth you put under the coins. That will probably screw up your picture. Use something BLACK with no shine from it.

The 1912 "might" be AU but the others are MS. I think the 15-P might end up a 64 (???).

You want to sell? PM me.

EDIT: Now that I look again I'd say the 11-P is probably the highest grade of the three. Pictures are never good enough to grade with...

jom

Meta

<< <i>As far as the pics go get rid of that red cloth you put under the coins. That will probably screw up your picture. Use something BLACK with no shine from it.

The 1912 "might" be AU but the others are MS. I think the 15-P might end up a 64 (???).

You want to sell? PM me.

EDIT: Now that I look again I'd say the 11-P is probably the highest grade of the three. Pictures are never good enough to grade with...

jom >>



I'll give the black cloth a try tomorrow and see if the pics come out better. The coins are actually better looking in person under magnification. For some reason I cannot get rid of what always comes out looking like bright flashy rubs in the flat areas that are hit by the glare of the lights. Judging with a 5X loupe in person I really think even the worst of the group is no less than a 62/63. The best of them could easily be a 65. I looked at a ton of gold coin pics from the heritage site and others, from present auctions and the archives, and many that even PCGS passed for 63's looked like crap compared to the worst of my four. I'm going to do some more work with the camera tomorrow and try and get them to LOOK like they REALLY look in person. I suppose this normal to struggle with a camera to make a coin look as nice as it does up close and personal. Practice, practice, practice.

darktone

Meta, those pictures are much better than the ones from the other day but I don't think they are good enough to grade by except to say they are AU to MS- could be better or worse. I know this does not narrow it down much. I think the biggest thing to go by is luster at this stage. Are you familiar with coin grading at all other than comparing these coins to others? How did you get these coins? and how much did they cost? mike

originalisbest

I would be very surprised if any of those came back less than 63s - judging by the photos. Very nice looking coins! Do get those slabbed, in order to maximize any value you may be looking to get out of them. Good luck.

Meta

<< <i>Meta, those pictures are much better than the ones from the other day but I don't think they are good enough to grade by except to say they are AU to MS- could be better or worse. I know this does not narrow it down much. I think the biggest thing to go by is luster at this stage. Are you familiar with coin grading at all other than comparing these coins to others? How did you get these coins? and how much did they cost? mike >>




My grading training began by reading how the process works and then comparing my coins to many others from various sites. If my assumption that heritage auctions photos are a really good representations of the original coins, then comparing each of my coins as they appear both with and without magnification to theirs should in theory give me a pretty good idea +/- one grade what mine really are. If you gave me ANYTHING but a mint state coin to grade I couldn't tell you much at all about it because I haven't studied anything nearly as much as mint state coins. Kinda funny. In fact, I spent the majority of my studies on mostly gold coins. The coins themselves belonged to my grandparents, neither of whom were collectors, who just squirreled them away at some point. There is also a bunch of Morgans, one of which looks nice, but most of which were damaged by someone at some point putting scotch tape on them to hold them to something. It left a `clean' shiny plasticky stripe where the tape was on most of the coins. Theres a bunch of Kennedys, a few peace dollars, some Ikes and an odd assortment of other coins that my initial investigations tell me are not significant. I'll take some pics of the more noteworthy ones. Are coins addictive????????????????

ps- I just put up pics of the two $10 indians and one $10 Liberty. The Reverse of the $10 Liberty is SO!!!!! ALMOST!!! perfect except for a little scratch.........grrrrr.

lordmarcovan

ONE $5 Indian is impressive.

MULTIPLE $5 Indians is multiply impressive.

darktone

Could you make the all the pictures as large as the reverse of the one of the 1913 $10? Your coins do look promising . mike

Meta

<< <i>Could you make the all the pictures as large as the reverse of the one of the 1913 $10? Your coins do look promising . mike >>




I must have edited that one different than all the others for some reason. That brings up a point that I have been thinking about. At some point of magnification ALL coins look kinda ugly and beat up. Its still all relative, but is there a point where anything more than 5-10X magnification gives a person a false sense of grade in a coin? The way the images look on my screen is about 7X the original size in the $5 Indians and about 4-5X the actual size for the $10 pieces. They can be blown up further in an image editor if you like. I will be experimenting with different ideas with the camera in the next few days and will post some more pics if I like them better.

darktone

<< <i>but is there a point where anything more than 5-10X magnification gives a person a false sense of grade in a coin? >>

Yes too much magnifcation in grading is not good either. Most coins I grade with no loupe. Their are many things a novice will miss because they are too busy counting each little mark under a 16X loupe and can't tell the coin has been cleaned or over dipped or some other big problem. mike

Meta

<< <i>

<< <i>but is there a point where anything more than 5-10X magnification gives a person a false sense of grade in a coin? >>

Yes too much magnifcation in grading is not good either. Most coins I grade with no loupe. Their are many things a novice will miss because they are too busy counting each little mark under a 16X loupe and can't tell the coin has been cleaned or over dipped or some other big problem. mike >>




I totally agree. I admitedly know very little about grading `problem' coins. I haven't `studied' how to spot a cleaned or dipped coin yet and probably won't until I get into this hobby more and the need presents itself. As for my gold coins, the fact that a very savy area dealer offered me almost 10k for all of them tells me that at the very least they are problem free. I'm sure he would have been more than willing to tell me that they were dipped or cleaned if there was even a hint of truth to it. As for significantly undergrading virtually all of them, well, that can be a matter of interpretation. I bet that people often walk into a dealers shop and play dumb just to see how badly the dealer is prone to ripping people off. Grading can be explained.......dealer says its a 63, owner says 65. One of them is MORE right but neither can outright say that the other guy is totally wrong. Has anyone here ever tested a dealer that doesn't know who you are just to see if they will severely lowball or undergrade a coin? I wonder what the ratio of honest to crooked dealers is. Its one thing to grade a coin a 62 when its really a 63 when its a difference of 20-30%, or a few hundred dollars, its another to rip someone off to the tune of many thousands, or tens thousands of dollars that goes far beyond what a dealer in anything that is less subjective could accomplish. Anyhow, it would be kinda funny to do an undercover investigation to see how low a dealer will stoop.

originalisbest

You've got a lot on the ball for (more or less) having just gotten into it. Get those pieces slabbed by either PCGS or NGC and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised (or maybe not that surprised) at the grades. Registered mail on those submissions for sure!!!

darktone

Meta, take a PQ PCGS coin to a coin show and ask dealers to make an offer and I am sure you will be surprised how low the offers will be. I did this with a PCGS MS64 RED indian cent and my high offer from a dealer was $35! I sold it the next week on ebay for $165 I think it was? The $35 offer was from a dealer that looked it up in the greysheet- I told him to move over a couple columns. mike

Merc

I hope you have good results from PCGS and the coins are real. There are excellent die struct counterfiets of the 5 dollar Indian for every date! They also have the correct weight and fineness of gold. I saw a complete unc set of these where every coin was a counterfeit.