PF Increases Grade After Selvedge Is Removed

Personal Opinion:
Vandalism
The guilty ? All you collectors whom are obsessed with collections being "pretty". or... Manipulating stamps for a few extra dollars.
"My stamp must fit the square on the page"

Selvedge helps the fine hairs of the perforation teeth from being attacked by dust, toning and rust.

Opinion aside.
I remain supportive of whatever the owner wants to do with his collection. Removing selvedge included. I just don't like seeing it.

To say the grade improved because of removed selvedge is a bit cynical, and likely unprovable. Aren't most centering scores based on standards now though?

The first and broadest vandalism in philately are stamp hinges.

wow, if a grade for this example (not even 90) hit that high with that kind of money being in play, SELL,SELL,SELL, Boo Ya!

selvage especially with the fiddely bits attached are often an aid to a firm identification of an item. we are all stewards for the future of our items. imo grading has destroyed more classic items for future collectors than selvage removal. collect as you see fit, but keep in mind what is once done is forever.

I guess maybe I have a different opinion. Now you have 2 conflicting certs that unless you plan on hiding one of them just shows that grading is still subjective. If there was a standard then both certs should have graded out the same.

Since they were both issued by the same organization, they are not really "conflicting". Just "updated". The most recent cert is the applicable one. And there will never be a "standard" for grading as long as it is being done by humans. If a computer program gets written to do every stamp by strict mathematics, then there will be a standard. At least for the actual centering; condition will always have to be looked at by people who have the knowledge to do so.

There are two discussions going on here – the propriety of removing selvedge vs. the practicality of removing selvedge to enhance the grade and market value. Personally, if I feel that the selvedge doesn't add interest to the stamp, and there is a good margin between the design and the perforations, I will usually remove it. If the line of perforations along that edge hasn't already been folded multiple times, the resulting fresh looking perforation tips after separation of the selvedge can improve the overall eye appeal.

I am not asserting in this case that removing the selvedge had anything to do with the two different grades obtained. Revcollector perhaps has the best explanation -


The grading difference can simply be because the stamp probably lies very close to both the upper end of 90 grade and the lower end of 95 grade. I doubt that 90% of examiners would agree on either grade in this case, and even the same examiner might grade it differently one day to the next. I think that knowledgeable dealers and collectors recognize this spectrum amongst stamps of the same grade, and for this reason, prices obtained at auction for high value stamps can veer far from SMQ valuations depending on where on this spectrum the stamp lies.

For ease of comparison, below is a composite of mint #261A stamps graded 90 or 95 by the PSE or PF since 2016.

To go a step farther, if we number the stamps 1-5 from left to right, #3 on the top row and #1 and #4 on the bottom row are only 85's to me based on the scans. They might look better in person, but I doubt it.

I disagree on the "updated" part. They are conflicting and I think it looks bad coming from the same organization. Every organization should have a policy and procedure in place to determine their grades other than just the opinion of who is looking at it. If it changes up or down they should include why they changed it. Things like this just confirm people's negative opinions on grading. Just keep submitting it until you find a better outcome. I find it hard to believe that a stamp gets better over time unless there are more stamps being graded and the categories shift when they make more buckets to put them in.

" Things like this just confirm people's negative opinions on grading. Just keep submitting it until you find a better outcome".

How often have you actually seen this happen? Differences in grades almost always happen between DIFFERENT organizations, not the same one. The most recent cert is always supposed to be the cert of record. That's why some new certs "get lost", because they downgrade an item in some way. If this had gone from a 90 to an 85, do you think the new cert would be so easily found in many cases?

This is well within the capability of a machine learning classifier, given enough time to obtain and label training data. It's possible, just not presently economically feasible. And advances in generating synthetic data and automating labeling are occurring all the time, so it's really just a question of someone taking up the mantle. If I ran PF, I would be starting to investigate it.

I shudder to think of how a machine could possibly classify bank notes accurately with any certainty. How many variables might there be in paper thicknesses and ink formulas and mixtures from the 1870's? And even to scan for basic repairs would take a huge database. And telling a hinge or gum remnant from a filled thin. Analysis of the surface objects would be another huge database. By the time it is finished, all the current collectors will be gone. I prefer people, who can rationalize what they see.

If the training dataset represented every banknote that you have seen in 60 years, with front and back image scans, labeled with all characteristics that you had noted at the time, plus all images from PF's database labeled with the content of the certs, the output for a given patient is capable of being the same as your evaluation (and arguably better because all output would include a confidence level value, which human expertizers don't). It is no longer a calculation problem or machine resources problem, it is a data acquisition and labeling problem.

So you are actually saying that it is impossible. No one can possibly remember all the information from every banknote they have seen in 60 year to put into a computer data bank. And it would take a lifetime to create. What each of us actually remembers is a range of factors that we come to recognize as belonging to a specific bank note company's products. It's an amalgamation of data from everything we have seen and everything we have read about and everything we have been told by others. This is true for any area of philately. I just chose banknotes because they are well before real standardization of manufacturing took place and there is a certain amount of potential overlap possible for a given item.