Fingerprints, Complements Of PCGS !!

It's called a mild case of OCD, and is curable.

Thats a little irritating. Roy, just a boycott on CCF wouldnt kill PCGS. I personallyv prefer PCGS because I have has bad experiences with them. A freind of mine sent a proof coin to them with lots of frosting and all. It came back totally different. All the frosting was gone. They damaged the coin, and the worst part is it came back in a details holder. NGC declining that they did anything. Luckily he had before pictures. SO NGC had a long battle but finally NGC lost. Frog, OCD, runs in my family, know what you mean, on a whole different leve;.

It is unlike Me to give up But I don't intend to waste any more of my time chasing this up with PCGS.
I am down a few hundred But PCGS has lost my trust and respect along with about 10k in grading fees a year.
I am just tired of the BS and their "token" efforts when simply replacing the ruined coins would have been the Right thing to do.
I am certain that if I ruined someone else's coin I would replace it with a coin that was the same grade or better and I am sure that everyone else here would do the same thing.

Trout, I feel really bad for you. Fortunately for me I decided to forgo using 3rd party grading on modern coins after viewing PCGS's and NGC's videos on youtube. Take a look at this video from PCGS.



At 1:53 you can see the grader handling the coins with bare hands and no mask.
At 2:47 you can see the encapsulator doing the same.
The same thing happens at NGC.



(Search NGC grading on youtube if this won't play for you. It's the one at the top.)
At 1:30 you can observe the grader handling the coins with bare hands and no mask.
At 3:00 you can see the encapsulator doing the same.
When I handle my bare coins, I always wear a mask and cotton gloves. I don't get finger prints and spots on my coins. We've all seen coins inside slabs with spots and finger print. I'm betting a good portion of those are imparted by the 3rd party graders. Spots and finger prints usually don't appear immediately, but it's too late by they time they do. 3rd party grading isn't cheap. For what they charge, the least they could do is handle the coins in a manner built around ensuring they do not get contaminated. Also, note the speed at which they flip the coins around. If the grader/encapsulator drops or accidentally touches a coin, is he going to tell his boss? Likely not, which is why proper handling should be built in to the process. Neither made a mention of how they control dust. I suspect because they don't.

While I do believe that 3rd party grading has its place, I don't believe that relatively common modern benefit from being 3rd party graded. I like things neat & orderly and definitely like a good presentation, but the cost and potential damage to modern coins has convinced me to get past not having nice labels above my coins. Mine go in air-tites or stay in the OGP. I actually prefer air-tites over slabs because it's more like you're actually handling the coin.
*** Edited by Staff to add YouTube tags. [youtube][/youtube] Please use them in the future. We prefer embedded video. ***

No headache sending coins to ANACS. Fast turnaround times, and only problem on one high grade coin was already there when I sent it in.

I don't believe the Graders themselves put the prints on the coins otherwise the grades given would have been higher.
These 25mm silver proofs usually grade between PR68-PR70 with PR69 being the usual grade achieved and about 10% making PR70.
The highest grade out the 10 of these coins submitted was PR68 and the lowest was PR66, This is telling me that the coins were "Mishandled" somewhere between being received and being graded as the coins were flawless when I sent them in.
I truly think that the prints were put on the coins somewhere in the chain between receiving the coins and them being graded.
I have had well over a thousand coins graded by PCGS and if the graders not wearing gloves was causing this fingerprint problem then I would have had a lot more problem submissions.

In this case something has gone horribly wrong between PCGS receiving my coins and the grading room, Remember the coins sit there for quite some time before they finally get graded.

These coins come from the Mint housed in air tights.
I carefully remove them from the capsules using gloves, like I have on hundreds of other occasions and put them into saflips.
Then I fold the saflips in half to close them and put the sticker with the sub# and line# on so that it also locks the flip closed.
The flips are then put into an archival quality binder page in sequence.
The page is then folded and secured with tape before being put into a padded posting envelope ready for submission.

I have used the exact same procedure for many hundreds of coins without ANY problems in the past.