I prefer my coins raw personally. I like to be able to look at the coin, to rotate it in my fingers (and I don't buy many coins in grades high enough for such things to matter - and not only due to that).
If I want to keep a coin safe, I put it in a tiny ziploc bag. Some might well consider it a primitive type of plastic slabbing already.
It's easily reversible, however - that is to say, it is very easy both to put a coin in a ziploc and to take it out (and of course if a coin is in AU or higher, I'd probably rather look at it through the thin polyethylene layer of a ziploc bag than risk damaging it with insufficiently clean fingers).
Most of the coins in my collection are normally located in ziploc bags (though many of these bags contain more than one coin).
The next step in slabbing is the flip - uncommon but useful; it's a harder version of the ziploc, protecting much better from the damage, but almost as reversible.
However, a flip puts a lot of restriction on the size of a coin that can be placed there; coins slightly larger than the ideal size won't fit at all, while coins slightly smaller end up bouncing all over.
My collection has, I think, perhaps three or four flips, most of them dating from before I joined CCF; more could've helped, but sources have been lacking lately.
The step after that - and by far more common than the previous - is the 2x2 holder; the body of the holder is typically made of some kind of cardboard, so it really only counts as a plastic slab due to the thin layer of polyethylene (or, rarely, some other plastic - they're pretty much indistinguishable in such contexts) over the empty cicrle in the cardboard.
It is not normally easily reversible the way a flip is; except for very rare cases, a coin bought in a 2x2 holder will stay in it, and a coin bought without such a holder acquiring one is rarer still. It also doesn't protect the coin from damage any more than a ziploc bag does (at least as far as damage to the fields goes - rims are protected much better).
It is, however, for some inexplicable reason, incredibly popular with coin dealers; leading to dozens upon dozens of otherwise great coins being put in ugly 2x2 holders, where one can't even look at their edge properly.
Finally, somewhat outstandingly, there is the one actual plastic slab in my collection. It is made of acrylic glass, held together with a bunch of metal screw nails, and contains about a dozen various German pre-euro coins (including several from the 1870s).
I bought it for only $7 (using the exchange rate of the time), and would've probably made more money than that just selling the coins in there; however, it is so beautiful - in its sheer weirdness if nothing else - that I just don't want to get rid of it anyway.
(Anyone still wants to say that they don't collect plastic slabs at all? I'm sure that many of them would've paid even more than $7 to get something similar.)
To end the point: I would've probably loved to get an example of a coin actually slabbed by
TPG, but I just don't have that kind of money; I did, in fact, at one point consider buying a slabbed coin, but decided that I didn't want to spend so much money (IIRC, the store wanted $75).
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Posted 02/17/2015 12:42 am
