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Is it normal for books to come back in worse condition?
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Started by jlnelson42,

24 posts in this topic

Qalyar

Qalyar

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Posted

I actually suspect that's a scanner artifact. The cover has a crease there (one that's intended, not in the defect sense) and a fairly glossy cover, and that affords a lot of potential for the very bright scanning light to reflect off the edges of that crease and appear as a white line in the scan.

Now, if it looks like that in hand, under normal illumination, that's something entirely different.

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revat

revat

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I would also say out of literally millions of books sent in to be graded, and with shipping both ways, plus handling by receivers opening and sorting the comics, to multiple graders handling each book, to the encapsulations process, one would assume some (hopefully low) percentage of books would come back in worse condition than they were when sent in.  I would guess the number of books that fit that description would literally be in the tens of thousands (at least).  Now the difference is not always perceptible or significant, but certainly sometimes it would be. 

So out of 25 years of grading, it's happened literally tens of thousands of times.  Is that normal?  But that's also much less than 0.1% of the time.  Is that normal?  Also, I don't have any data to back any of it up.  Hopefully that helps.

Also, as others have stated its probably mostly glare and angle and lighting, but with a small side of damage in my totally unprofessional opinion.

 

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Albert Thurgood

Albert Thurgood

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Another possibility is it could have been someone else's copy sent to you. Someone here a while ago reported they got a lower grade copy of their book back. Close examination revealed it was a different book. They somehow eventually got their higher grade copy back.

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The Lions Den

The Lions Den

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On 9/3/2021 at 6:23 PM, revat said:

I would also say out of literally millions of books sent in to be graded, and with shipping both ways, plus handling by receivers opening and sorting the comics, to multiple graders handling each book, to the encapsulations process, one would assume some (hopefully low) percentage of books would come back in worse condition than they were when sent in.  I would guess the number of books that fit that description would literally be in the tens of thousands (at least).  Now the difference is not always perceptible or significant, but certainly sometimes it would be. 

So out of 25 years of grading, it's happened literally tens of thousands of times.  Is that normal?  But that's also much less than 0.1% of the time.  Is that normal?  Also, I don't have any data to back any of it up.  Hopefully that helps.

Also, as others have stated its probably mostly glare and angle and lighting, but with a small side of damage in my totally unprofessional opinion.

 

Those square bound books can be tough. The simple act of opening the cover can cause slight damage... O.o

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Qalyar

Qalyar

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On 9/25/2021 at 8:21 PM, JasonTodd69 said:

Is there any comic out there that isn't ruined after being sent for grading? Cgc really needs to focus on the quality control, it feels like they don't even care how many precios memoribilla they destroy. 

For what it's worth... I haven't really kept count of how many books I've had slabbed, either for my personal collection or via my involvement in the business side of the hobby, but it's probably north of five hundred at this point, dating all the way back to the red-label Modern days. In all that time, I've had one-ish* book that had to go back for a label correction, one book that had a hair in the slab, and no books significantly damaged by the grading process.

A lot of books get slabbed, and relatively few have problems. We see the vast majority of those problems here, so confirmation bias is a legitimate concern. That's not to excuse some of the damage or the label problems (especially the multi-book label swapfests; seriously, people...), but most books are not damaged by CGC's handling and encapsulation. I still think the OP's images are more consistent with reflection from a very bright scanner (look at the difference in color saturation between the scanner image and the unslabbed photograph!) rather than actual damage, but I'd need the book in hand (or other images) to really know for certain.

* Technically, I've had two mechanical error returns, but the other one involved some debate with CGC over how they were labeling a low-value somewhat obscure book, and ultimately resulted in a change the labeling policy for it; I don't really consider that to be an error per se. The second printing they recently slabbed without notation, that one was on them.

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Maskedvigilante

Maskedvigilante

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On 9/27/2021 at 1:52 AM, Qalyar said:

For what it's worth... I haven't really kept count of how many books I've had slabbed, either for my personal collection or via my involvement in the business side of the hobby, but it's probably north of five hundred at this point, dating all the way back to the red-label Modern days. In all that time, I've had one-ish* book that had to go back for a label correction, one book that had a hair in the slab, and no books significantly damaged by the grading process.

A lot of books get slabbed, and relatively few have problems. We see the vast majority of those problems here, so confirmation bias is a legitimate concern. That's not to excuse some of the damage or the label problems (especially the multi-book label swapfests; seriously, people...), but most books are not damaged by CGC's handling and encapsulation. I still think the OP's images are more consistent with reflection from a very bright scanner (look at the difference in color saturation between the scanner image and the unslabbed photograph!) rather than actual damage, but I'd need the book in hand (or other images) to really know for certain.

* Technically, I've had two mechanical error returns, but the other one involved some debate with CGC over how they were labeling a low-value somewhat obscure book, and ultimately resulted in a change the labeling policy for it; I don't really consider that to be an error per se. The second printing they recently slabbed without notation, that one was on them.

Actually i have recently joined the board after a while and all I'm noticing is lack of quality control maybe it's psychological. Ever since Blackstone acquired cgc, several YouTubers and boardies were posting pictures of books ruined by cgc.

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Maskedvigilante

Maskedvigilante

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On 9/27/2021 at 1:52 AM, Qalyar said:

For what it's worth... I haven't really kept count of how many books I've had slabbed, either for my personal collection or via my involvement in the business side of the hobby, but it's probably north of five hundred at this point, dating all the way back to the red-label Modern days. In all that time, I've had one-ish* book that had to go back for a label correction, one book that had a hair in the slab, and no books significantly damaged by the grading process.

A lot of books get slabbed, and relatively few have problems. We see the vast majority of those problems here, so confirmation bias is a legitimate concern. That's not to excuse some of the damage or the label problems (especially the multi-book label swapfests; seriously, people...), but most books are not damaged by CGC's handling and encapsulation. I still think the OP's images are more consistent with reflection from a very bright scanner (look at the difference in color saturation between the scanner image and the unslabbed photograph!) rather than actual damage, but I'd need the book in hand (or other images) to really know for certain.

* Technically, I've had two mechanical error returns, but the other one involved some debate with CGC over how they were labeling a low-value somewhat obscure book, and ultimately resulted in a change the labeling policy for it; I don't really consider that to be an error per se. The second printing they recently slabbed without notation, that one was on them.

Well what I see is there are alot of factors involving the slabbing, and I think you're right here.

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Qalyar

Qalyar

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On 9/26/2021 at 3:58 PM, JasonTodd69 said:

Actually i have recently joined the board after a while and all I'm noticing is lack of quality control maybe it's psychological. Ever since Blackstone acquired cgc, several YouTubers and boardies were posting pictures of books ruined by cgc.

It's not new. There have always been books that have problems in slabbing. Now, recently, the rate of submissions to CGC has reached ludicrous speed and gone plaid. There's some reason to believe that the rate of errors (either label errors or physical damage to books) has increased; it's possible that CGC's processing isn't dealing with this volume crest very well (besides just the TATs). It's also possible that we're just seeing more problem slabs on the forums because they occur at a fairly consistent rate, and there are a lot more submissions overall. I don't really know which of those is the correct assessment of the situation, but I know that going off gut instinct based on forum posts isn't exactly a statistically rigorous analysis, as it were. Regardless, the Blackstone acquisition has had approximately no impact; if there has been a real problem lately, it definitely dates to the tide of submissions since last year's lockdowns began, and not to any sort of top-level corporate change.

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The Lions Den

The Lions Den

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On 9/26/2021 at 5:40 PM, Qalyar said:

It's not new. There have always been books that have problems in slabbing. Now, recently, the rate of submissions to CGC has reached ludicrous speed and gone plaid. There's some reason to believe that the rate of errors (either label errors or physical damage to books) has increased; it's possible that CGC's processing isn't dealing with this volume crest very well (besides just the TATs). It's also possible that we're just seeing more problem slabs on the forums because they occur at a fairly consistent rate, and there are a lot more submissions overall. I don't really know which of those is the correct assessment of the situation, but I know that going off gut instinct based on forum posts isn't exactly a statistically rigorous analysis, as it were. Regardless, the Blackstone acquisition has had approximately no impact; if there has been a real problem lately, it definitely dates to the tide of submissions since last year's lockdowns began, and not to any sort of top-level corporate change.

(thumbsu

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