2014 Sac $1 Proof--No Cameo Reverse

No...it's not the enhanced uncirculated....I took them both out of proof sets myself...Here are pictures of the obverse of the same two coins...both full DEEP CAMEO. It's only the reverse that has a difference in which parts of the design have a cameo appearance.

On one coin The letters and some of the lines on the clothes are DEEP CAMEO...
the other parts are mirror finish...NO CAMEO....like the fish and the faces.

On the other coin ALL RAISED SURFACES are DEEP CAMEO

Looks very much like an intention difference in the way the dies were prepared.

It definitely looks like something is going on here. I wonder if the they did the frosting of the devices in two passes, one to give it an overall frost to the devices and one to give an additional depth of frost to certain areas to provide extra contrast such as on the lines on the indian maidens dress, and this die missed the overall frost pass? Because it doesn't look like there is any contrast between say the maidens arm and the fields. Both appear to be brilliant proof surfaces but the lines on the dress do appear to be frosted. If so then it probably wasn't deliberate but it would be from an "error" proof die and it would be significant. (Wish I could see these in hand and not just from images, which I do not trust.)

I just checked my two 2014 NA proofs, I buy both the proof and silver proof sets every year. They both look, more or less like normal proof cameos. I did read an article recently about the 2016 commemorative proof finishes that I think will help shed some light on what happened to this coin (there is a link to the article in the commemoratives section of this forum). What it says is that the mint laser engraves the frosted fields to different levels and next year the commemorative dollars will feature this. According to the comments the mint has been using this type of finish for a few years, it started with the 5 star general commemoratives. I did notice that my 2014 NA proofs seem to have a slightly different level of frosting in some areas of the design, notably in the design details of the clothing. IMHO (I am no expert and will never claim to be one) it looks like the die that was used for this coin received the first level of laser frosting but never had the second level, therefore you have an error coin worth certifying.

What I would do (remember that free advice is worth every penny you pay for it) is, if possible, take it to two different LCS to verify if it is indeed a possible error. If they support this idea then get it into a third part grader ASAP and get ready for a fun ride.

I checked the 80 coins we have on hand and found 72 to have the "full deep cameo reverse" while 8 had the "partial deep cameo reverse". It would be interesting to hear from others to see if this 10% is typical. We also did not see any "in between"...so I think there are definitely two different versions. Perhaps the difference is intentional....maybe the mint started out with the partial deep cameo reverse but didn't like the way it looked so they changed to the full deep cameo reverse later in the year...a type 1 and type 2. Or it could be an error in the way some the dies were prepared...I really don't know enough about die preparation for this particular coin to know if that is a possibility. If it was an "early or late die state" difference I would expect to see some of the 80 coins we checked to exhibit an appearance in between the to coins pictured above. Any other opinions on what could be going on would be appreciated.

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