Hey there! Just wanted to put this out there to see what kind of feedback it got… So I was just talking with a friend of mine who brought something up… he said he was confused as to why the backs of PWCC cards always look so great. The 8’s and 9’s on the upcoming auctions look amazing. This isn’t the first time either. I’ve purchased cards from PWCC myself and have noticed this, but just thought to myself “oh well that’s probably why they were sent into pwcc, because they are extra clean”… Now that I think back though, there has been at least two times where I have purchased cards from them that look like they have flawless backs… and they don’t, not even close. Same card. Same cert, and a real life eye appeal that doesn’t match the pictures at all. Anyone else experienced this??? It’s too bad because I remember one of the cards was a psa 9 shadowless magneton I purchased. I could probably still find the PWCC listing , but I no longer own the card.
Sounds like a lot of time and resources for very little gain and a lot of consequence if this was true and was discovered.
If they wanted to make more money they could start by improving their listing titles or splitting up duplicates. They don’t even bother with this but you think their will hire professional graphics designers to fraudulently modify their images?
Odds are the lower resolution images on ebay hid a lot of the damage.
I highly, highly doubt it. It would make no sense to do that when you process the kind of volume they do. What, they’re going to gain 20 or 30 bucks for a random Magneton of which they get a small percentage? No way.
They do use lower resolution scans which is understandable because going into higher res would make file sizes too big for Ebay so they’d all need to be resized and the raw files alone would burn through hard drives on their end considering they process thousands of cards each auction block.
Post the scans of questionable ones. Digital image forensics is a thing and you can usually tell if the original file is manipulated.
Edit: “Odds are the lower resolution images on ebay hid a lot of the damage.” <— This.
Edit 2: I’ll also add that personally, when I take scans I do it at 1200 dpi. That file is something in the neighborhood of 8-9 gigabytes. I have a separate HDD I use specifically for this and it’s made for video and image processing yet it still takes a minute to load all my scans when I open a big folder. If they processed 3000 cards at 8GB a piece, that would equate to 24 terabytes of data. Not gonna happen. At least not today. Power to the small sellers with this one.
Brent is way too busy (lazy) to do that. He won’t even split up identical cards from closing at the same minute.
You think they would need to hire multiple graphic designers to slightly manipulate the blue on the back of a Pokémon card…?
You see how many cards they list? You also need to do a good enough job that people won’t notice.
I don’t think PWCC have the time or care about doctoring the backs of cards that earn them maybe $10-$20 total, it’s not worth their reputation to gain a couple of bucks more commission. They’re listing 30,000 cards a month and pokemon is a tiny percentage of that, scanning in that many cards would be tedious enough let alone editing the image afterwards, even if it does take a minute.