My first vintage deck purchases (KEM)

[Soochinator]

Well I ventured out into the world and found some vintage decks I was interested in enough to buy. I'm sure this is only the beginning. They are all KEM decks of varying production years from 1947 - 1965. Some are even sealed with their tax stamps! How cool is that?

Edit: All the photos are from the sellers, so sorry about the bad quality on some of them. I'll be able to take better shots once I receive them all.

[Soochinator]

Here are the rest.

[Kruser]

Wow! ... nice items! 

I like how your first purchases are so focused ... I remember buying a bunch of random things that made no sense together! 

Looking forward to seeing some better images - those are some cool back designs! (... digital scanner maybe? - Just saying!!  )

Enjoy your cards!

Kruser

[Soochinator]

Thanks!

I have two double deck sets of USPCC KEM's that I bought from PlayingCards.net, so once I found out a little about KEM's history I was naturally interested in buying pre-USPCC KEM's. I didn't plan on buying so many right at once, but we all know how that goes. Maybe eBay should add a pop-up message after you click "buy it now" that says "Are you sure? You have bills to pay." Lol

I actually learned a lot from a 2013/2014 post on here talking about why the AoS always says ©1935, the reorder card always says ©1947, and how to actually read the production date code on the AoS. They also pointed out the difference between actual Bakelite cases and the ones that came after that. It really helped out a lot with deciding which auctions to buy as (like they said) a lot of sellers advertise their decks as "1935" or "1947" decks, when they are obviously not if you have a little knowledge on the subject.

I don't have a digital scanner, but I do have a pretty nice camera (Sony a5100). I only have the kit lenses though, so I'm sure a digital scanner would do the cards much more justice. I'll have to look into that. Any pointers on what I should look for when shopping around for one?

[Soochinator]

Hey, just realized my laser printer has a scanner built in. The Brother website says it's capable of up to "19200 x 19200 dpi (interpolated) resolution". I'm no scanner pro, but that sounds like good quality marketing hype to me! I'll have to test it out when the decks come in.

edit: Just researched what interpolated means and found out that the optical scan resolution matters much more. The optical scan resolution is only 600 x 2400 dpi, so not that great. Perfectly fine for documents, but not enough for really high quality color photo scans. Oh well. I'll scan my 2015 KEM's and see how they look.

edit2: Scans added. Quality on the computer at full resolution is pretty bad. All the dots and edges of everything are really fuzzy. I guess I'll have to look into a quality scanner down the road.