Just noticed the PSA site is saying a card needs to be centered within 55/45 to get a 10. Was it changed recently ?
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Seems so. It used to say this:
Attributes include four perfectly sharp corners, sharp focus and full original gloss. A PSA Gem Mint 10 card must be free of staining of any kind, but an allowance may be made for a slight printing imperfection, if it doesn’t impair the overall appeal of the card. The image must be centered on the card within a tolerance not to exceed approximately 55/45 to 60/40 percent on the front, and 75/25 percent on the reverse.
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Changing the standard after authenticating 100 million collectibles and being so far in the lead on current market share would be wild. I bet they were cleaning up their language and removed the wrong number. Simplest explanation.
Saying “approximately” followed by a range was always dumb. Removing 55/45 would leave it functionally the same. I believe this was their intent. Removing 60/40 however changes it entirely. I tagged psacard and nat turner in a story earlier asking them for clarity. Nat usually answers DMs so I will report back if I hear anything.
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If they are making changes to the grading standard then they should send out an email to inform all the members or make a public statement. I know that might not look good but this looks even worse. This is complete lack of transparency. Nat Turner or Ryan Hoge always preached applying consistency in their grading standard so if they change it then they need to announce it.
Good job on using the way back machine to figure out the recent change, Dan.
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Wonder if the change on the website is just to acknowledge a slightly stricter standard now that they’re using AI to grade centering rather than the old fashioned eyeballing-it.
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Is this actually confirmed though?
Many 9s I’ve seen recently have been quite oc.
It was but the grader still has the final say on the grade is my understanding.
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I’ve not sure if there’s been any kind of official statement or that sort of thing but Nat Turner has mentioned it several times in interviews.
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I could have sworn I saved a screenshot of their 10 standard from several years ago, but I cannot find it now - the 55/45 was only recently added with that range last year, correct? It seemed like they were trying to quietly make the transition to eliminate the 60/40 ruling, which seems to have finally happened.
From a marketing & business strategy standpoint, would there have been a better course of action? It was clear that the current market demands have shifted and many newer collectors are pursuing that “pristine” level condition, that PSA 10’s could not necessarily differentiate given their broader range. Instead of creating this “pristine” grade, they opted to tighten their current PSA 10 standard.
Given that PSA silently changed their slab material, I think it’s reasonable to assume that they wanted to silently adjust their 10 centering standards.
For large companies, making fewer waves with announcements is often better. Consumers are hard to please and enjoy complaining (see CGC changing their grading scale, BGS wanting to change their grading scale), so silent changes can lead to quicker adoption.
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Adding onto what Dyl said about companies doing things quietly, they do it all the time, for example a little bit ago KitKat changed their logo but as far as I’m concerned they never publicly announced it (someone correct me if I’m wrong) they just changed it and called it good, I tried the new logo one vs the old one a little ago and the new one looked slightly thinner and had a very very slight change in tase I’m sure they do this all the time
If they did it “silently” the timing couldn’t be better. BGS is going through some type of turmoil and everybody is focused on CGC with the prototype disaster.
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Did you end up hearing back?
Lol 12 posts and 5 days between responses. Yeah they did good to hide this.
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The question was kinda dodged, but I did try to follow up. Regardless I do believe whatever change they wanted to make, they’ve been proceeding w/ it for the past year or so. So if you’ve been content with your results, I would assume it would stay the same. I’ll update if he says anything else.
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I did not, but due to this thread bump I had a couple people DM me on IG who had separately DMed and heard back from Nat. I’ll get to my computer and post wayback machine timestamping of the new and old statements. Its just wild to say what Nat said ^ because the old and new standard are just functionally different. If they removed 55/45 and kept 60/40 then it would be cleaner language and functionally the same.
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Here was the file I had made to show the timestamps on how recent a change this was on PSA’s site.
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Huh okay so they’ve been going off of 45/55 for a while. Thanks for the responses