Everyone has seen different quality cards score a grade of PSA 10. In your experience, which imperfections are allowed? To my understanding, the four primary categories are: holo, edges, corners and centering.
My second question is, generally what separates a PSA 10 from a PSA 9 quality card?
First and foremost the eye-appeal. A GEM MT 10 Card should look as close to flawless as possible. This in turn sharply affects the pricing.
Pretty much any imperfection can exist in isolation. As soon as imperfections multiply, that’s what steers it away from a 10.
So a tiny corner nick, but perfect centering, surface, and edges could get a 10.
Or a tiny faint scratch with no white edges, perfect centering etc., could get a 10.
It’s once any of these single flaws are more pronounced or are numerous that 10 likelihood decreases.
It depends if the card is being graded before or after the grader’s morning coffee
From what I’ve seen they tend to be a little more lenient on factory defects except for print lines (I suppose because print lines cross the entire card). But the weird cut corners that are common with older cards and the white fraying that will happen on corners or edges I’ve seen get overlooked if the rest of the card is perfect.
This ^ however don’t expect to get that same treatment if you send in a mint 1st ed base Zard. Maybe back in the day but not now lol
I wanted to participate in this thread since I had some similar thoughts and I really tried to find out what does separate the 9s from the 10s, when I started getting into collecting of graded cards.
Careful inspection of some cards that I own led me to the conclusion that quite often the differences can be small, and even the 9s can be better looking. This, paired with seeing some videos of cases getting cracked, cards resubmitted and several of them coming back as 10s, made me take the decision to mainly collect 9s. I will pick up a 10 when I encounter one and the price feels right, but more often than not, to me as a collector personally, the premium price of a 10 is not worth it. All in all, it’s a decision I am very happy with, as it allows me to collect a higher quantity of cards now as well, and fits my budget as a collector better. And even then, there might always be a few favorite cards I would potentially want to upgrade to a 10 one day, I won’t be without any collection goals for a while, that’s for sure!
So I did notice that generally more leniency is shown on the back of cards. As Melchior mentioned, it seems to be first and foremost the eye-appeal. I took pictures of 3 of my 10s to show some relevant examples:
This one has some minor edge damage on the reverse top border. I think it’s the only defect the card has, and quite small
I think this is a badly cut corner? Which would be a factory defect, on which PSA generally tends to show more leniency. Still, this one surprised me a bit.
This card has 2 defects. First of all the top-to-bottom centering. It’s nothing extreme, but can definitely be noticed at first glance. Besides that, silvering on the entire right border. I tried to capture it on the picture, which is a bit tricky. But I believe some sets have these issues with silvering, Neo Destiny being one of them. I heard someone on Discord mention before: “Basically all Neo Destiny PSA 10 Holos are PSA 9s due to the silvering”
Such good insight. This brings up another question. Does PSA grade some high end/low pop cards harder than others?
Nah…the graders are mostly clueless to what they’re grading…and they really don’t care or need to know.
Graders spend on the order of seconds per card. They are not going to look up the pop report for every card and they don’t care if some fire weasel is pop 6 or something.
But for something like your 1st ed charizard, it might be recognized and may have a little extra attention given to it. No doubt using a higher service level means you aren’t getting graders on the first day of their job
@voltagic, pics did not show up.
I have been struggling to get pics to show up on here 
Do you know perhaps if a certain format is required or size limitation is in place?
Try using the tapatalk app when making posts with images. That way, you upload the images directly (similar to using other social media apps), no need to use 3rd party sites like imgur.
Awesome, that worked out! I managed to edit my original post, appreciate the help.
Basically anything that they don’t notice while half of them are high/bored/making close to minimum wage. Dents, whitening, scratches, we’ve seen it all.