Tips for High-Quality Scans of Your Sports Card
Showcasing your sports cards’ potential to buyers is crucial when trading online on sites like eBay or Sports Buy. This means using only good scans of your cards, and to help get you on the right path, we’ll talk about some quick tips for high-quality scans of your sports card in this article.
Aside from boosting the sale price of your cards, good scanning also allows fellow traders to get a solid idea of your cards’ quality. Noting folds, dents, and other flaws in the description is good practice, but a nice scan does a better job of capturing the condition of your cards. A picture paints a thousand words after all, and in online card trading, it’s the pictures that often make or break the deal.
4 Tips for High-Quality Scans of Your Sports Card
Use Swiffer for chrome cards
Chrome cards are the hobby’s most tradable items, but they’re a pain to scan. Dust just shows up on chrome cards, whether it’s Topps Chrome, Bowman Chrome, or any other Topps brand using Chrome stock like Finest, Bowman Sterling, or Platinum.
The best fix for this seems to be a Swiffer duster. Swiffer is a company known for its interchangeable dusters and you can get a 5-pack box of Swiffer refills for just around $5 at your local shop. Aside from removing dust from your cards, a Swiffer duster also removes dust from your card cases and scanner. Unlike other dusters, it also locks the dust, making sure you don’t go around spreading more of it as you dust your cards.
Use a flat bed scanner
You probably already know this but here it is again: never feed your card into a scanner. Using a non-flat bed scanner will most likely fold and damage your cards.
The best scanner to use is a flat bed scanner. Flat bed scanners let you scan multiple cards at a time and can even accommodate larger items like BGS and PSA graded cards. Compared to other scanner types, flat bed scanners also take higher-definition and higher-resolution sports card images.
Change scan settings to 300 dpi at least
DPI stands for “dots per inch.’ Increasing the dpi settings means sharper and more detailed scanned images. No matter how good your scanner is, you probably won’t get great scans if your dpi is set below 300.
Remove sleeves and top loaders
If you’re using an all-in-one kind of printer/scanner, you’ll probably get poor scans if you go about it with your cards still in their protective casing. So, removing them from their top loaders and sleeves is one way to get better quality images.
However, please take note that doing so is risky as it may increase the chances of damaging your cards, so best proceed with caution or better yet, use a dedicated scanner instead of an all-in-one.
Explore our blog to discover more tips for fun and successful sports card trading. The Blez website also has lots of sports cards up for sale and our daily live card breaks might just bring some cool additions to your collection.
