Posted 07/12/2022 01:20 am
I don't like either of them, myself.
Slabs are too bulky and clumsy; one of the things I find attractive about coin collecting (as opposed to my mum's teaspoon collection and my dad's seashell collection) is that it takes relatively little amount of space. Slabs kind of negate that. To me, slabs simultaneously make coins more expensive, and less desirable.
Albums "force" me to try to "complete a set", and I'm simply not motivated enough to pay the big bucks needed to buy the key dates to "complete the set". I simply can't justify to myself spending thousands of dollars or more, on a coin that looks for all intents and purposes identical to all the other coins in the "Set" except for the date and/or mintmark. And they refuse to make "set albums" that are missing those key dates. So if I got an album, those nagging empty holes would sit there, forever unfilled, mocking me. And most people who get "pushed" into "completing the set" wouldn't dare keep their multi-thousand-dollar rare key date sitting next to all the riff-raff in an album; they might take a picture of the "complete set" for posterity, then whip the valuable key date back out of the album again and put it somewhere safer - so even when the set is "completed", the "hole" in the album stays unfilled most of the time. Which might partly explain why a surprisingly large number of US collectors "give up" on collecting a set, once that set is reckoned as "complete".
I also rarely agree with the album-makers as to what constitutes a separate "member" of the set, or not. The OP's album, for example, somewhat arbitrarily draws the line at "20th century". Fair enough, it's easier and cheaper to fill than a "full US type set" going all the way back to the fugios. Yet their handling of commemoratives is... incomplete, with only one space for each series of commemoratives (eg. only one "state quarter", only one "territory quarter", only one "National Parks" quarter, etc). The 2021 Crossing the Delaware quarter is somewhat arbitrarily tossed in with the National Parks quarters. And of course, there are no spaces for "classic commemoratives" at all, nor for modern commemoratives, nor ASEs and other bullion coins, all of which I'd personally want to see included in a "US Type Set" album.
Finally, of course, the albums rarely give adequate space for series expansion. This album stops in 2021, with no room for adding the new quarter types, nor anything else the government decides to churn out in the leadup to the 250th anniversary. The album-makers, of course, want moderns collectors to keep buying new albums as each series continues to expand.
So for me, the OP's question becomes, "which of these do you dislike the least?". In which case, the answer would be "albums". In spite of all the negative points I've made against albums above, I still think slabs do more harm to the hobby than albums do.
Slabs are too bulky and clumsy; one of the things I find attractive about coin collecting (as opposed to my mum's teaspoon collection and my dad's seashell collection) is that it takes relatively little amount of space. Slabs kind of negate that. To me, slabs simultaneously make coins more expensive, and less desirable.
Albums "force" me to try to "complete a set", and I'm simply not motivated enough to pay the big bucks needed to buy the key dates to "complete the set". I simply can't justify to myself spending thousands of dollars or more, on a coin that looks for all intents and purposes identical to all the other coins in the "Set" except for the date and/or mintmark. And they refuse to make "set albums" that are missing those key dates. So if I got an album, those nagging empty holes would sit there, forever unfilled, mocking me. And most people who get "pushed" into "completing the set" wouldn't dare keep their multi-thousand-dollar rare key date sitting next to all the riff-raff in an album; they might take a picture of the "complete set" for posterity, then whip the valuable key date back out of the album again and put it somewhere safer - so even when the set is "completed", the "hole" in the album stays unfilled most of the time. Which might partly explain why a surprisingly large number of US collectors "give up" on collecting a set, once that set is reckoned as "complete".
I also rarely agree with the album-makers as to what constitutes a separate "member" of the set, or not. The OP's album, for example, somewhat arbitrarily draws the line at "20th century". Fair enough, it's easier and cheaper to fill than a "full US type set" going all the way back to the fugios. Yet their handling of commemoratives is... incomplete, with only one space for each series of commemoratives (eg. only one "state quarter", only one "territory quarter", only one "National Parks" quarter, etc). The 2021 Crossing the Delaware quarter is somewhat arbitrarily tossed in with the National Parks quarters. And of course, there are no spaces for "classic commemoratives" at all, nor for modern commemoratives, nor ASEs and other bullion coins, all of which I'd personally want to see included in a "US Type Set" album.
Finally, of course, the albums rarely give adequate space for series expansion. This album stops in 2021, with no room for adding the new quarter types, nor anything else the government decides to churn out in the leadup to the 250th anniversary. The album-makers, of course, want moderns collectors to keep buying new albums as each series continues to expand.
So for me, the OP's question becomes, "which of these do you dislike the least?". In which case, the answer would be "albums". In spite of all the negative points I've made against albums above, I still think slabs do more harm to the hobby than albums do.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
I do have a few dozen slabbed coins I 'had' to buy that way but am not happy to look through my albums and see those unsightly holes where the coins should really be.
