02-04-2022, 12:36 PM
(02-04-2022, 12:19 PM)Dean Wrote: I suspect by a "hard" grader they probably meant on standard! When I think of USA grading I guess I really just mean PCGS and NGC graded coins. Now I'm not saying the USA grading is any more accurate than NZ grading. But there is a lot more graduation to the USA grading system than the basic AVE, VF, EF, AU, UNC as described in Bertrand. That leads to a bigger incentive in NZ to up the grade by one given the significant benefit in value that can be obtained by doing so. With the USA grading I can be fairly confident that an MS65 coin will be "better" than an MS62. However with NZ I would be less confident that a coin described as AU is better than one described EF.
It's a tough call.  Even with careful definitions, we know how much room there is for "interpretation" with the half-dozen choices we have in our system.  The way I see it, the US system just creates 70 definitions for people to interpret idiosyncratically.  The ANA introduced its own standard a few years ago in competition, and at variance, with the others, so it's a mess even before you start on the amateurs who can't interpret a definition properly.