Upload your pictures here: Absolutely. In very recent years I've also seen a new trend towards people automatically stating an autograph is a fake because it doesn't fit the 'perfect example' of a celebrity that they've seen somewhere as a pre-print on official merchandise or the like. I think that's a really big problem, and can ultimately be detrimental to the hobby as a whole, because we all know that we could sit down ourselves and sign our own name 100 times and there will be differences between them, often HUGE differences.PeppersFan90 wrote:
Well said... I agree completely. I've also collected autographs for most of my life and over the years, just as you've said.... I started realizing that COA's are useless. Up until recently I held out hope with authentication companies like PSA/DNA because they supposedly inspect the ink flow, pressure points of the signatures and etc. But like you said... it all comes down to one's opinion and again, I've seen some PSA/DNA certified autographs that are nowhere close to a consistent signature of some people. With Johnny Cash for instance, I know you can buy things on his website but they're very expensive and they come with a letter of authentication from someone who worked for and with him for several years...may be my best option but again... I'd still be taking a leap of faith based on someone's opinion because I think this guy goes out and finds signatures he believes to be authentic, looks them over and decides if they're legit or not before reselling them on the site.
I do wonder if this is sometimes one of the problems authenticating companies are facing too, and if so, then I can understand their frustration. There are some celebrities I have a number of autographs from, and many of them were signed for me IP, and yet they vary (some of them in extreme ways). I've been standing outside in the rain at a signing, and have ended up with wet, smudged signatures. I've experienced more than my fair share of jostling, forcing the celeb's signature to go wonky; I've witnessed celebs' attention being drawn away by security mid-sign, resulting in a stalled sig (and as such, change in pressure points)...the list goes on.
When it comes down to it, authenticating is as likely to have its flaws as anything else in this life does, and some of us tend to forget that. They aren't superhuman companies, and they will sometimes get it wrong. There's this bizarre belief in the hobby that if an item comes with a CoA then it's somehow fail-proof, and that's simply not the case (as anyone who has ever looked on Ebay will tell you), but the fact still remains that countless people will only buy an autograph with a CoA, and will pay significant amounts more for the privilege of that piece of paper. And so the cycle continues.
Really, the only way to truly know if it's real is to get it signed in person yourself, and we all know that's impossible for every single autograph we wish to obtain. At some point you just have to get real and you have to start teaching yourself about purchasing a 'sound' item.
Wow, I didn't expect to ramble so much!
