Understanding The Words - All Different - For A Stamp Collector .

Many times on stamp chat rooms I bring up these words ---Is it all different ?
These are important words that we see especially for stamp auction firms and missing when a huge collection is written up in their catalogs . It is the two words stamp collectors don't make clear in their discussions here when talking about worldwide collections .
The question I like to enject into the same discussion is are they ALL-DIFFERENT . ?
What is not clear is it Trash Bags filled with stamps on paper in someone's garage or a humid dirty basement . We now are seeing 1,000,000 stamps on pallets of sheets of stamps still wrapped in the printers plastic wrap . at stamp auctions ,so a collectors can claim his collection has a million stamps but fails to announce he bought it at a stamp auction for $1,400.00 plus $2,000 dollars shipping it to his house .

So to be clear what is --ALL DIFFERENT ?
Does it include watermarks differences and does it include perforation difference . Then the area of color or shade difference ?
For us it is easy to agree on watermarks in the paper and also perforations differences . Shades of color becomes more of a problem because to be sure or to follow what is published , I would need over 200 different catalogs of each country ,plus special research booklets just to have a reference library.
Then we come to the attitude of collecting what you want and how you want in the hobby and which everybody agrees on .

So some day in the future ,hopefully will be able to change that claim of 330,000 all different to number like 400,000 in a few years because of pages like this .

I'm willing to go well beyond perfs, watermarks and papers.

If someone has taken the time to find identifiable features (other than damage) that show "these two/five/ten stamps are not the same, because..." those are probably going to count as "all different" in my eyes.

A sequential collection of numeral cancels, from any number of early issuers? All different.

Early stamps of Danzig, with thirty different postmarks? All different (and not easy to do).

Penny Red plate number collection? All different.

KGV Jubilee plate flaw collection? All different.

Canadian re-entry collection? All different.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. A person can go as deep as he or she wants, to the point of creating new reference material, and a friend of theirs can collect face-different topicals. Everybody's happy.

Color is the biggest problem. One person sees 16 different shades, another person only a few.

In some ways it comes down to value. All the same cheap stamps is what most collectors try to avoid. Really just about every vintage stamp is different. Almost no two stamps are the same with perfs and color considerations. On avg, I look value (stamps that catalog 20 bucks and over) and diff cat numbers.

Greendragon --- Agree with you . But it also hold true a person who is a specialist of a certain country or even a worldwide collector will pay more than catalog for a lot of those cheap stamps that catalog as low as 25 cents or under a dollar . I as a collector would pay 200% of catalog to get them . Many 0f the stamps in the above picture I posted has many 25 cent stamps but I didn't have them in my main collection . It took me over a hour to sort a bunch and find them .
So a serious country collector or even me will think , I rather pay $5.00 to get a page of various perforations all ready I.D. than spend the next five years looking around to discover them myself .
So a page which looks to you as cheap value stamps can also be viewed by a more experience collectors who does not have them .They don't have to be high catalog value,but is only has to have something his collection is missing so him or me will say the easy thing is to buy that page for $5.00 or $6.00 and that's cheaper than piece meal it over the next few years.
I have seen this years ago in Chicago with a friend who collected Yugosalvia ,he would check his album and if a stamp had a nice cancel ,or a color shade or a different perforation no matter how common the stamp was if he didn't have it ,he was ready to give you a dollar for it .

Floortrader - yes and agreed a specialized collection of well described cheap stamps would still be all different to me.

If I had a Harris WW album and a Scott International album with all the same stamps mounted, those would be duplicates. Though that duplication would not be as bad as Harris WW and loose stamps in glassines.

When it comes to auctions you only see the term "all different" whenever the lot doesn't have much going for it. It means that there are no singularly valuable items or Countries and the stamps were not "selected by a longtime collector with a discerning eye". It means that the stamps are kind of sad looking but are ALL DIFFERENT.

It's like listing a car for sale and saying "tires have decent tread left".

I think your both right , your statements are correct . 99 % of the time by both the album will tell you and 99% of what the stamp auctions post in their catalog description of " all different" means just cheap stamps with the reason of nothing of value here that we can talk about .

Then there is the less than 1% where the collection takes your breath away due to size and content , a collection that each country can stand on it's own on the auction floor .