Help With 1850-O Dime

Yeah, I have searched and searched and cannot find many pictures at all to compare it to. The reverse of the head and stars is way more defined than the obverse.

I wish that there was a coin shop in my town. The closest one is almost to Memphis which is about 1 1/2 away from Tupelo.

I think I might stop by there next time I am on my way to play poker in Tunica and let them look at it with their equipment and see what they have to say. Either way, I am glad that I picked this particular coin up.

That, too, because once the coin starts getting well into the AU range we have to seriously start thinking about strike quality, and for that I have to make you pretend I didn't say the reverse was unimportant.

But that would have been a very_long_post.

Pics, you say? Wander over to Heritage Auctions (ha.com). Register, it's free and they won't ask for financial info. Then you get access to their archives, two million coin sales going back to 1990 with ridiculously high-resolution images. They have over 17,000 Seated dimes alone.

And only 29 1850-O's. See what I mean about your coin?

$15? Um, yeah, that wasn't a half-bad deal.

Well, that's kind of droolworthy.

See the completely sharp shield on BH1964's coin? Required for high XF or better. See the right side stars, by comparison to the left? Strike.

Now is where you you wander over to the reverse, and note that to an extent the right-side leaves are slightly weaker (especially at the bottom) than the left. The dies were not perfectly parallel. And on smaller Minors, this effect is magnified, like all die placement effects because they're so much smaller and so much less metal is involved. Strike is a larger factor in evaluating Minors than larger issues.

This is where I differ from some in grading. Grading is subjective by nature, of course, but it's my subjective opinion that I should grade as objectively as possible. Therefore, I need first to evaluate strike, and if strike is a factor on any face of the coin it puts the onus upon me to grade the coin based on the best this specific coin could have been.

The conventional wisdom in numismatics is that the lesser-graded face decides the grade. It's wise because it's conservative, and I teach it here.

But I don't believe it.

Graders wave off any disparity in apparent grade between faces, never considering the fact that coins wear equally on both faces. To me, any apparent grade disparity between faces - on the order of 5 grading points or better - is a red flag telling me I have to think harder, and in cases like that I'm likely to grade based on the better face, as long as I can come up with logical evidence that the other face demonstrates an older die or weaker strike.

TPG's will do this too, but only when the disparity is so great that it slaps you in the face.

It's only when you adopt this mindset that you start seeing how truly wide the range of die wear and strike artifact is among examples of any given issue. And why would you punish a coin of lesser strike by saying it has more wear?

That is the perfect mindset for a numismatist. For the moment we'll call yours XF40 pending better images. We have a Photography Forum to help you with that.

Nice coin to start. I keep away from most coins like that since not really easy to come by. And usually the prices are rather high.

Again, still learning. I didn't realize that the silver weight changed in 1853. I am enjoying discussion. This post has gotten several reads. As soon as I can figure out how to photograph the coins well I am about to post some more out of my collection for help grading and such. Thank y'all again for all the feedback and everything.