(poll deleted, since the results became blatantly obvious)

lordmarcovan

COIN A:





COIN B:





Coin A has a decent grey color to it. I like its look overall. There is, however, that distracting spot above the head, and a faint hairline on the reverse. It looks nice enough in hand, as I recall. Perhaps the spot could be played with, using an item from bag of tricks: a bamboo skewer point. Haven't tried that.

Coin B has some attractive, faint iridescent colors, but more marks. Some of the toning is a little scudzy and there's a rim nick on the reverse.

Option C, to get rid of both and go for a nicer one, is not impossible, but not easy either. These go $80 in XF and $300 in UNC in the 2009 Krause, and I am as poor as the proverbial church mouse these days. I can't quite fathom the high catalog prices unless local demand in Asia is a factor, since these had a mintage of 3,000,000, making them practically dirt common in comparison to some of the other stuff in the collection that has much lower mintages and surprisingly lower catalog prices.

What say ye?

(FINAL EDIT: Ye said A, overwhelmingly, with B getting not a single vote, so I deleted the poll. Had y'all been able to see the coins in hand, it might have been more evenly matched, though it might have had the same outcome in the end.)

ajaan

A

pendragon1998

Depending on how willing you are to resell and upgrade later, I'd say choose 'A' or skip them both. I like 'A' quite a bit, but the scratch on the reverse is very distracting to me and there's no telling what's under the black glob. The ding on 'B''s rim and the toning remove it from my consideration. If it was me, I'd probably just save my money for another purchase.

lordmarcovan

I just took them out and got out a loupe to examine them close up in hand.

Coin A's spot looks as though it rests above the surface and like it might have responded to the bamboo skewer. It didn't, however, and I didn't wanna poke or scrub at it too hard. The skewer would not have scratched the metal, probably, but would have disturbed the toning.

Coin B looks far better in hand than in the pics. It definitely has superior luster to Coin A (which you can't really see in the photos), and does not appear quite so grungy in hand. However, there is a noticeable scrape on the obverse bust, which you can see in the picture, and there is still that rim nick on the reverse. The rim nick doesn't leap out at you with the coin in hand, but the obverse scrape is noticeable.

Edit to add: neither is optimal, but I guess I'll keep one until a nicer one comes along. It looks like A is the favorite so far.

terribleredmonster

Photobucket says the images are gone.

lordmarcovan

Sorry- I've been moving albums around. I'll fix 'em in a sec.

olmanjon

I just looked up the 1901 5 cent in my 2007 edition. It was only $20 in xf and 150 in unc. That's quite a bit of jump in just two years. How about the rest of this series? Have they gone up in value also across the board or just a few specific coins?
Olmanjon