Sample Slabs - What Are They?

There is a hole collecting base of sample slabs! I know absolutely nothing about them, other than the fact that I find them to be pretty cool! Lets hope one of our members that collect sample slabs can help you out!

At long beach in 2 weeks they are having an exhibit of every PCGS sample slab from 1986-present. I'll try and get pics for a ccf thread

There aren't a lot of us who collect sample slabs, and the information available is quite thin.

Conder 101 covered samples in his (out of print) 2003 book (you can borrow it from the ANA library if you are a member).

Cam tracked samples in his SampleSlabs.com site until is death in 2010. He shared information quite freely, I wish I had known him.

The information from those two was one of the sources David started from, plus his correspondence with several knowledgeable individuals, his personal collection and tracking sales on ebay.

Quoting his acknowledgement:




It makes for a rich field that is easy to contribute to. For example, when I bought the Bolivian 2 Reals (S# NGC-Br2-4-1)...

NCG's database gave me the size of the run and also the coins contained in it.

The style of the label matching against Conder's book gives an approximate date.

Some Google searching shows a newspaper article about the winners of the YN Treasure Trivia game at the SLC ANA show.

Is it conclusive? No. I would need internal information from NGC (and truth to be told I haven't asked - bad on me). But it's plausible (shout out to MythBusters).


So you can play too.

ProofReader's sample appears to be a brown label, so it matches S# NGC-010-3-8.

David notes that 204782-xxx was reused many times. Very close to ProofReader's item, there is also S# NGC-010-2-8 (green label). And FA 00 and PF 65 NGC brown labels and PF 65 NGC green labels. So we have proof of several runs just there.

For NGC-010-x-8 David indicates both 1960D and 1963 dimes, however NGC's database for -073 says 1963 dime - https://www.NGCcoin.com/certlookup/204782-073/

Further the database shows -115 but not -116, so you know at least one run went up that high.

So is it RARE? Not really, we can broadly say that several hundred substantially similar slabs exist. But we also know that survival rates are questionable, with people cracking them out, throwing them away, etc.

And, if you have OCD, you need all five varieties

NGC-010-2-7
NGC-010-2-8
NGC-010-2-9
NGC-010-3-8
NGC-010-3-11

Plus any new ones that surface...


(One of the great unknowns about NGC in general is the brown vs. green label question. Conder is color blind so he never realized there was a difference. The fading of brown and green to grey would account for a lot of the confusion, but it means the -2- and -3-s in David's book would need to be combined and perhaps broken out based on hologram styles or something else that gives some kind of provable history)

S# NGC-Sd1-9-1





No, I don't have one... never seen one.

They aren't RARE - there were 500 (at least each says 1 of 500) and there might be 10 or 20 (or more, the press run of the book sold out) people who collect sample slabs. But this kind of oddball item attracts a lot of casual collectors, type collectors, etc.

David guesed $35, but you don't find them on ebay because they don't say sample. Most of his pricing comes from tracking sales there over a couple years. And from reports of private sales...

Since the book came out, there have been up and down movement on prices. I've seen ebay auctions sold for over $300 and for $0.01... and the usual crazy stuff - one week an item sells for $85 the next week the same item strugles to make 25.

From what I have heard/read, Sample Slabs are produced for promotional reasons, like group/club gatherings, coin shows and other forms of advertising.

Some are rare (less than 50) while others into the thousands.

Most, not all, Sample Slabs have nonsense serial numbers (12345678) and are normally not given an actual grade (MS64) but there are always new ones being discovered.

Most are smaller denominations, but I have seen Morgan and Peace dollars as well as American Silver Eagles and some other countries as well.

Some people, like myself want to gather all of the different types or generations of Sample Slabs but my focus is on PCGS.

Apparently, there are not a whole lot of us out there, especially overseas.

What if you & conder became the new steward of SS.com B and take up where cam left off

I prefer Conder101's cataloging system. This would be one of the few times to buy the slab and not the coin.