Worst EBAY trim jobs contest

acowa · August 28, 2005 2:36AM

The only rule is that nominated cards have the seller fail to disclose the fact that its trimmed.

Here are my nominations.

jrdolan · August 28, 2005 4:53AM

This may not be the worst trim job of all time, but it's an expensive one: The seller wants $1800 for a sliced-up Aaron rookie. It's not even trimmed squarely. The first scan shows the PRO 8.5 Aaron up for auction. It's hard to see the borders against the white background in the faint, hazy scan. (Think that's an accident? -- no way!)

So I imported it into PhotoShop and adjusted the brightness and contrast so I could see better. Then I cropped out all except the card itself, being careful not to cut off any off the card (somebody already did that).

Then I scaled a scan of my owned untrimmed Aaron rookie (PSA 6) so that its inside borders matched those of the PRO's, to ensure the cards could be compared using the same ruler. I made an exact red silhouette of my card and placed it behind the PRO, then lined up their left outer edges. The red you see is how much was taken off the PRO Aaron, though not necessarily all off one side. You can also see that the trim was not square, because the card is noticeably smaller on the bottom.

Top to bottom, the PRO matches up well and probably wasn't touched on those edges. But side to side ... caught red-handed, so to speak.

The next scan shows the PRO 8.5 Aaron's top and bottom over my Aaron's top and bottom. Again, the PRO is measurably narrower, especially on the bottom.

The other thing I noticed is that a PSA 6 has corners as good as a PRO 8.5. So why trim it? Maybe it was only EX or worse to begin with, but that's still a more valuable card than this emasculated piece of scammer crap.