Agreed:
@Dyl - The tolerances for receiving a PSA 10 is indisputably larger than the tolerances for the black label but the differences are borderline negligible for a “strong 10.” Given that “perfection” would hold a higher value, I’m curious to see if the community will eventually agree to some ratio relative to the PSA 10 valuation.
Since there was a local submission for BGS grading a couple months ago, I decided to give it a try and send in some cards… After straining my eyes for about an hour and a half the night before the submission, I settled on about 25 cards that would be PSA 10 equivalent - I ended up receiving multiple BGS 10s and a couple black labels - all of this to say that after reviewing the conditions of the cards again in the graded slabs, the differences seemed so minute and subgrades inconsistent that it felt very arbitrary by the grader(s) of the cards. (And completely unrelated, I need to say the QC of BGS was absolute garbage for this submission - seeing dust particles between the sleeve and the slab of two of my black labels is absolutely triggering - it really felt like they slabbed the cards in a dusty garage)
@smpratte - I did not jump on the PSA grading train until around 2015 - would you say that in the early days of PSA grading, was there also a wide range of pricing for PSA 10s, or has it there always been a more consistent ratio between the 9s and 10s?
@pfm - I suppose there’s something to be said about humans historically wanting to chase perfection and purity in an imperfect world 