Professional Grading Company

[keystoneantiquities]

About 10 years ago, everyone and their uncle was starting a professional grading company. I can think of 10 of them without breaking a sweat.

Now there are three:

BGS
PSA
SGC


BGS has ethical issues (it always has) but recently giving the Strasburg a BGS 9.5 has pretty much woken up collectors to the fact that BGS is a Gem Mint factory for the right people.

PSA has the best reputation of the bunch, in fact I use them almost exclusively for grading, but lately a lot of not-so-great cards have found their way into Gem Mint 10 holders, making my legit 10s not so legit.

SGC has a weird grading scale and their representative at shows is pretty clueless about the hobby. If the representative looked more like Denise Richards than Larry the Cable Guy, I could deal with that, but beside that SGC has always been the third grading company and it has produced quite a few stinkers lately.


I'm wondering if the time is finally right to start a grading company to challenge these guys. You can put a full blown image of a card multiplied by 10 on an HD screen, grade the sucker and enscapulate it at a reasonable price.

How hard would it be to break into the market. I am a self-proclaimed PSA snob, so getting a guy like me to come over would be tough, but what is the main issue regarding professional grading, is it price or quality? I'm thinking that if a grading company started out with low prices people would try it. Am I right?

Any and all thoughts would be appreciated... oh and for certain if I did this I'd get out of the card sales business completely as a conflict of interest... but I'm keeping my PSA 10 Jose Theodore rookie card, I don't think anyone would mind that.

[dfr52]

I believe it would be difficult but possible. IMO it would require taking away graders from one of the big three and doing so in such away that they were the face of the company. GAI went that route but had issues w/ consistency and standards.

I think the big 3 all have their own niches and issues but overall they do a pretty good job.

[Scottish Punk]

I think the next step in grading is to minimize the human element. A really good scanner and some good custom software should be able to give you a fair, consistent, impartial grade. Set the parameters inside the computer, scan the card. The scan would give you a precise measurement on center, edges, and corners. Not sure how you would deal with surface though. That would be the direction I would go.