Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Satin Finish Mint Sets

Here is a great article we found on http://coinblog.org/:


The United States Mint has indicated that the "satin finish" will no longer be used for the annual Uncirculated Mint Set. This finish had been used for the sets since 2005. From 2011, a brilliant finish will be used.
The satin finish has a frosted look that is created by sandblasting the coin dies and burnishing the coin blanks. This created coins that were potentially in higher grades, provided they were not covered by contact or handling marks.
For some years such as 2005, higher grades are abundant. However, in the past two years, more often than not coins could not achieve the highest grades due to the aforementioned contact marks.
With the change, registry set collections will have less coins to worry about finding each year. Some interesting subsets are also created, consisting of satin finish coins issued from 2005 to 2010. Personally, I had been working on a satin finish Presidential Dollars Set. Now, I will try to complete this collection in earnest.
The scheduled release date for the 2011 Mint Set is February 8, 2011. This will be many months earlier than the release date set for the 2010 Mint Set.

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