"sgt23" wrote in message
...
On Apr 18, 4:48 pm, "mazorj" wrote:
"sgt23" wrote in message

...
On Apr 17, 8:42 pm, Ken Fscher wrote:

On Fri, 16 Apr 2010 05:50:33 -0700 (PDT), Peter
wrote:

On Apr 16, 5:54 am, Ken Fscher wrote:

I had a "Whoa" when I was listing a 1916P Mercury
tonight and the picture of the reverse looked as if
there was a D but with the die mostly filled;

I must be confused. I don't see a 'mostly filled' D, anywhere on the
dime. It certainly is not where the mintmark usually appears.

I have a 30 power loupe, and I don't see it
on the coin, but when I look at the picture, "it looks
as if there was a D".

I searched to see if there was filled die strikes
cataloged and found a statement about 264,000
strikes and half a million coins in collections. :-)

For now I consider it an optical illusion,
but I won't list the coin.

I think you can be pretty confident if you didn't see a D under that
much magnification it does not exist.

Actually, anything over 5x is good mostly for spotting and identifying
extremely tiny isolated details like whether a really small dot is
perfectly
circular or slightly elliptical.

That means that super-magnification tends to lose the bigger picture of
the
forest's patterns of trees. These are better identified with low
magnification or the naked eye. Once identified that way, closer
examination under higher power (especially with stereo microscopes) gets
you
into the realm of nailing down specific die markers, looking for obscure
hints of counterfeiting, etc.

Has he tried that yet,

How would I know?

and if he doesn't see the D, are there any other possibilities?

Sure. When directly viewing the coin it could be something as simple as a
latent, vaguely D-shaped surface discoloration visible only under certain
lighting, angles, magnifications, etc. If you're looking at an image file
or print, it could be an artifact that is not present on the coin but
something that got added by uneven lighting, the lens, limitations or
defects on the imaging chip, the camera's recording algorithms,
post-production "enhancement" software, or issues with the viewing monitor
or printer.

Sorry you asked? :-)