[parkerj33]

I would like to chime in here. I lead a software R&D team and we have some of the brightest Machine-vision software engineers around. We solve problems like these every day. We are involved with medical applications, not sportscards, but i can assure everyone here that the technology exists to identify card issue and to identify flaws (or perfections) quite easily. We do things like detect cancerous cells from normal cells via software algorithms. As many have said, the technology to detect or analyze will not be a show-stopper.

Its just a matter of effort and dedication to build the card-specific application of known algorithms. I am developing a user-friendly tool that allows non-machine-vision people to build their own algorithms out of our technology. Its possible this could be used to identify and classify cards by issue, and to also do some analysis of surface, corners, wear, scratches etc. Like someone said, this kind of stuff is done in manufacturing every day. Your iphone screen gets to you without scratches because of these types of systems in manufacturing to weed out the bad units.

I would add that detecting reprints from real could be very tough to do. the feel of card stock might be very difficult to assess. But the software could easily detect the printer "dots" if it came from a laser printer or photocopy and not a real print process.