Hello MOPO,
Movie Collectors World just featured an article on MPgrading, our new
Authenticating, Grading and Registry site. Freddie Poe was nice enough to ask
me to write the article on my thoughts of where the Movie Poster hobby is going
and why we launched MPgrading.
We are proud to announce we just signed our 11th Dealer and have been adding
hundreds of posters per week to our Registry including an incredible collection
of 50's Sci-Fi inserts. There are now 1000's of posters for sale on our site by
our Authorized Dealers. We charge NO COMMISSIONS or FEES for buyers or sellers
when they purchase posters, even Registration is FREE to access our detailed
high resolution images. We wanted to create a site where a collector can check
ONE website and search 1000's of posters to find what they are looking for.
For the next 6 months we are offering all of our services for $5 for posters
under $200, or $10 for posters over $200. We are even offering deferred
payments for large collections. Here is what you get when using our service;
1. 21 megapixel image, the very best in the industry.
2. Expert Grading using our Patented Computer Grading System. UNBIASED and
REPRODUCABLE, this is a first for any collectible!!!
3. Posters entered into the Registry/Census which will become an invaluable
tool for Dealers and Collectors alike in years to come.
4. COA which features our patented Microchip which houses all the information
about the poster.
5. Authentication by industry experts that have over 100 years combined
experience in the hobby.
6. For private collectors, a way to house detailed images of their entire
collection for insurance purposes.
Please check out what we are doing on our website and READ the article below
before commenting. I answer many questions in the article.
Regards,
Todd Spoor
www.mpgrading.com
MPgrading.com Article on printed in the March MCW
If you ask almost any Dealer or Auction House, sales have been down and pricing
has been down. For poster collectors trying to find poster at a reduced price,
this is a good thing, but for the struggling dealer that is relying on poster
sales to put food on the table, this is terrible. This hobby, like many others,
is set in their ways. Dealers want the highest prices available for the posters
they are selling while collectors are happy to keep investors types away from
the hobby in order to keep prices low and to have less competition for the
posters they are searching for. This, however, is a double edged sword!!!
Without new collectors and new demand for rare old posters, everybody’s
collection will continue to decrease in value. Who in their right mind wants
this to happen? No one wants to see a poster they spent a $1,000 for drop down
to $100 ten years after they purchase it. But this is exactly what has been
happening to some poster genres. One only has to look at the auction results
over the last 15 years for many silent films and 1930’s Westerns. In many cases
they have hit rock bottom and may even go lower. For years this hobby has been
dominated by an older clientele with a passion for old movies that they grew up
watching, this was great because they had money to spend, but as time goes by
and the older clientele move on to greener pastures, who will be there to
replace them??? Do new, young collectors give a damn about Errol Flynn, Buster
Crabb, Charlie Chaplin or even Jimmy Stewart for that matter? If we were to
poll every dealer or auction house’s clientele, you migh!
t find a total of a dozen collectors under the age of 30 who want pre-1940
posters or even most 1950’s posters. This is going to cripple our hobby in
years to come unless we can change the mindset of many of the leaders of this
hobby that are set in their ways. Let’s face it, everyone likes when they can
buy something for less than market value, but when it comes time to sell it, we
all want market value or above, it’s human nature.
So what can be done? We have a plan…
If you are reading this article and have gotten to this point, it means you are
passionate about movie posters, so here’s a hypothetical scenario; if you were
to branch out to a new hobby that you knew relatively little about and start a
NEW COLLECTION, would you feel more comfortable buying from a third party
Authenticator so that you were assured you weren’t be taken advantage of, or
buying a worthless reproduction that is advertised as Authentic like we
constantly see being sold on ebay? If you are being unbiased, the answer would
probably be, buying from a third party Authenticator. To put this in
perspective, I have a friend who is 34 years old and who only 2 years ago
started collecting sports memorabilia. He is marginally into sports and doesn’t
have a ton of money, so he is not your typical collector, but he only buys
items Authenticated by PSA DNA which is the largest third party authenticator
of Professional Sport Memorabilia. When I questioned him about only!
buying PSA items, he quoted, “Why would I spend this much money on something
unless I know it’s authenticate.” I also asked why he started collecting and he
said, “It’s better than sticking money in the bank, I can hang the items on the
wall, enjoy them, and hopefully they will someday be worth more than what I
paid for them.” I thought to myself, this guy should be collecting movie
posters. The funny thing is though, he isn’t, even though he loves movies much
more than he loves sports. We need people like this to join our hobby!!!
MPGRADING.COM
Have you ever wondered how many copies of your favorite movie poster have
survived and are in the hands of dealers or the general public? This has been a
burning question for almost everyone who has ever entered into the Movie Poster
collecting hobby. Unfortunately, we may never truly know, but now we can come
close... Introducing MPgrading.com
MOVIE POSTER CENSUS
What MPgrading does: We have created a patent pending Registry/Census system
for movie posters by creating a unique 9 digit code for each poster. This
permanent code gives each poster its own unique finger print which is
completely unobtrusive and maintains the complete integrity of the poster. The
ink used in the 9 digit number is completely invisible to the naked eye and can
only be seen under a high frequency UV light. The ink itself is laced with
organic DNA and is unique to MPgrading.com, which means it cannot be duplicated
or counterfeited. The chances of someone replicating our DNA ink is 1 in 33
trillion, thus ensuring complete security. The 9 digit invisible ink number is
placed in the lower right hand corner on the front of the poster as well as on
the Certificate of Authenticity. For example, if you were to go to our website
and look up “Breakfast at Tiffany’s size 30x40” you will see #110000145 which
has a grade of VF- (8 on a scale of 1-10)and #11000043 w!
hich has a grade of VF+ (9). So far in the census we have registered 2 of this
particular size poster. It is our hope, that over the years as we receive and
register more posters, this will become an invaluable tool for old and new
collectors alike to be able research how many posters are out there on a
particular title, their condition, as well what each poster has sold for as it
changes hands while moving from Dealer, to collectors, to Auction houses.
Currently, under our current system, if you were to look up a particular
poster title on Heritage of eMoviePoster, that same poster may have been sold
numerous times on each site or even traveled between each auction house at
different times, thus giving it an unusually high occurrence when it is really
the same poster and much more rare than indicated by the times it is showing up
to auction. In the comic book industry, comics are encapsulated in a
protective plastic “slab” and given a number to track it, but if the s!
lab is opened that SAME comic can be re-submitted and the Company woul
d have no way to tell if it had already been graded and registered, thus giving
an inaccurate number to their tracking service and more importantly, the
grading could be completely different depending on who is grading that
particular day. Which brings us to the next revolution in the Movie Poster
hobby…
MOVIE POSTER GRADING – ACCURATE & CONSISTANT
As a collector of movie posters, I have always been frustrated when receiving a
poster in the mail and it is NOT in the condition that was advertised. I think
almost everyone who has ever purchased a poster on ebay can attest to this!
Whether this was done intentionally or not makes no difference, the fact
remains that the current movie poster grading system is exceptionally broad and
is open to large variants of interpretation. There are hundreds of auctions
running right now that have individual posters listed with multiple grades,
such as “Fine/ Very Fine” or “Good/Very Good”… Well, if I’m buying this poster
I want to know which one it is, if it on the low end of “Good” than I may not
want it, but if it is on the high end of “Very Good” than I would definitely
want it. The problem is really NOT that the poster has two grades, but that the
interpretation for the grades is so broad that the person doing the grading
really can’t decide which category it!
should fit into. This is also really NOT a problem of the person doing the
grading but inherent in the grades themselves. If we were to send this poster
to 10 different industry experts we would most likely get 5 or 6 different
grades, maybe more if it was their poster and they were trying to sell it. This
is not a knock to any dealers, sellers or Auction houses, just a simple fact
that the most often quoted grading system, the “Warren Poster Grading Scale,”
is somewhat accurate when describing the Mint or Near Mint posters, but when
you get down to anything around C7, here’s what you get as a reference if you
were the grader; “70% of C10, so still a very nicely preserved item.” What
exactly does this mean??? It’s really anybody’s guess, and so you can get a
huge range of conditions that can fit into this category. This is not a knock
on Jon Warren, in fact, my hat is off to Jon for even attempting to give the
Industry some sort of guidelines for grading espe!
cially when you take in account the enormous amounts of information th
at come into play while grading a poster, it is truly daunting; pin holes,
stains, tears, holes, missing paper, writing, tape, tape residue, fold line
wear, fold line separation, and the list goes on.
So what we did at MPgrading is, designed a patent pending computer program that
designates a grade based on cold hard facts. If the person grading the poster
can count and measure, no matter who is doing the grading, the grade will
ALWAYS be the same. There is no bias or interpretations. For example; if a
poster has 10 pin holes in the border, 6 pin holes in the image, 2 one inch
tears in the border, and 1 two inch piece of paper missing in the image, all of
this information is fed into the matrix and the computer gives the poster a
specific grade. What this means is, that if the person grading your poster is
having a bad day, it will NOT affect the grade of your poster, nor is there any
way for one person to have a differing opinion then the next grader. With the
help of Ron V. Borst and Todd Feiertag, two of our hobby’s longest running
collectors and dealers, we spent over 1000 hours fine tuning this system to
insure its accuracy. As a final test, we brought in 3 people !
with no movie poster grading experience and had them grade a poster. All 3
grades were the same and were identical to the grades of Ron Borst and Todd
Feiertag. No other collecting hobby can claim this level of accuracy and
consistency with their grading. Even Coin collecting and Comics Collecting
where the difference of a single grade can mean the difference of hundreds of
thousands of dollars, grades can vary from one submission to the next and are
open to varying degrees of interpretations of the grader. Which, leads us to
encapsulation…
SLABBING/ENCAPSULATING
Coins and Comics do have a slight edge over Movie Posters in that they are
small and lend themselves to being encapsulated in plastic, thus protecting
whatever grade it was given at the time of submission. However, if you didn’t
like the grade of your comic or coin, simply tearing it out of the plastic and
resubmitting might lend itself to a different and potentially higher grade, and
when the high grade could result in thousands of dollars, who wouldn’t attempt
this several times? Movie Posters obviously can’t be encapsulated nor who would
want this? Thus once a graded poster leaves our facility the way to insure that
the poster is of the same grade when it is later sold or changes hands is by
comparing the poster to our 21 megapixel high resolution image provided on our
website. This poster image provides an extremely accurate depiction, or road
map if you will, of how the poster looked and displayed when it left our hands.
Of course, if there is EVER a question, MPg!
rading will re-grade the poster for free. There are some people that say
because the poster is NOT encapsulated, that the grade is meaningless, and to
that I say, for how many years have people accepted grades from every major
Auction; Bruce Hershenson at emovieposter.com, Grey Smith at Heritage,
Christies and Bonhams, or even major dealers for that matter, with the grade
that they assigned when it left their facility and there was NO WAY to ensure
that it was the same grade upon arrival. Our hobby as accepted these graded
poster for over 20 years. With MPgrading’s 21 megapixel high resolution image
to compare against and our computer generated grading system, we put forth that
we are offering a better solution then anything that is currently available.
ENCRYPTED MICROCHIP TAG
The last measure of security is our patent pending Encrypted Microchip tag,
this tag is affixed to all card stock posters as well as the Certificate of
Authenticity. This paper thin 1”x3”tag contains a microchip that houses all of
the information about the poster. The tag can be read by our hand held scanner
which will reveal all of the poster’s information. Since the microchip is
encrypted no one can change any of the poster’s information.
AUTHENTICITY/ CERTIFICATE
MPgrading has over 100 years of combined movie poster experience. As most of
you know, the Movie Poster industry was rocked with many high end Universal
Horror fakes which resulted in the loss of Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars.
Our Authenticators have been working with posters for decades. We also included
a Certificate of Authenticity that accompanies the poster, complete with the
Microchip tag and DNA ink mark that corresponds to the invisible ink mark one
on the poster.
ONE STOP SHOP
As a collector for over 13 years, one of my biggest pet peeves was the
inability to find the poster I was looking for. There are a ton of great
dealers out there that have very impressive websites, however, it is extremely
times consuming and labor intensive to search each site individually. There are
even more Dealers that have very little or NO web presence that I wouldn’t even
call because they are hard to get a hold of or don’t really know what is in
their inventory. I would sit there and say to myself, I wish there was ONE
website that had all of these posters listed together so I could search for
that special poster much faster. At MPgrading we are offering a very unique
experience for Dealers and Collectors to address the above issue. ..
For Dealers, we are offering a way to put your entire inventory on our web
site. If we Register, Grade and Authenticate a poster for an Authorized Dealer,
that poster can be listed “For Sale” on our web site and there are NO
commission or listing fees WHATSOEVER. We accept credit cards on line, and once
the poster sells, we can wire the money directly into the Dealer’s account, at
which time the Dealer sends out the poster to the prospective client. What we
want is for collectors, especially someone who might be new to the hobby, to be
able to search thousands of Authentic, Computer Graded and Registered posters
on one web site, thus giving them a positive buying experience so that they
will hopefully continue to collect long into the future.
As a special incentive for Dealers to take advantage of this program, we have
slashed our Evaluation fees for the NEXT 6 MONTHS unit JULY 1st 2011. We are
also offering a deferred payment program so that a dealer that wants to send
more than 100 posters at a time they won’t have ANY out of pocket expenses
except for shipping one way, we even pay for shipping fees back to the Dealer.
This means we will do ALL the work;
Grading (Computer designated, unbiased grade)
Authenticating (with COA microchip tag)
Registering/Census (with DNA 9 digit ink mark)
High Resolution Image (that the dealer gets to keep and put on their own web
site too)
The dealers pays nothing UNTIL the posters sells, at which time we are paid
only the small fee of $5 for posters valued at under $200 or $10 for any poster
valued at over $200. We currently have many high end posters listed on our
site, but are also looking for dealers that have more modern posters, 70’s
through the present day that are valued under $100. So Dealers, if you haven’t
already contacted us, please do so to take advantage of this incredible offer.
310-591-4386
For Collectors, if you are looking for a title, size, condition or even
nationality of a particular poster you can now search ONE site to maximize your
time and the scope of your search, with hundreds of new posters added each
week, we will hopefully have what you are looking for. You can even request a
poster if you don’t see it listed yet and week can email our dealers to see if
they have one in their inventory.
I know we are new wrinkle in the hobby, but we need your support. As you can
see from the fees we are charging we are not in this to become rich. I
personally do NOT want to see this hobby fade away and hopefully you don’t want
to either. We are always open to suggestions and are will to work within the
limits of almost every collector and dealer. I look forward to hearing your
thoughts.
Todd Spoor and the rest of the MPgrading staff
www.mpgrading.com
[email protected]
310-591-4386
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