Image(Qualifier)

Image clarity is a qualifier flaw. This means it represents a factory flaw which can be found on pack fresh stickers. This should not drop the grade of the sticker but should be clearly called out when offering the grade of the sticker, ie "Nearmint but with stray printer marks" or "nearmint but with blurry image". This allows for more clarity than just dropping the grade of an otherwise nearmint sticker to EX+ as some collectors aren't concerned with factory flaws and would accept stray printer marks nearmint sticker over a sticker that dropped to Ex+ due to corner wear. One could argue that a sticker can't be graded MINT with a factory flaw as MINT is flawless. I don't subscribe to that theory as I seek consistency and again saying a sticker is "MINT but with stray printer marks" is much more meaningful than dropping a MINT sticker to Nearmint due to the marks as nearmint implies there are post pack opening flaws.

Blurred Image: Just as it sounds, the image is not clear, reading the words may make you rub your eyes or put on your glasses.

Toning:This is very common in middle series 5-7 stickers for some reason. Some really hate toning and other collectors don't care. The toning can be severe enough to make the border around a card almost brown. Whole sets with toning are more eye appealing than mixed sets. In general, I prefer white borders but given a choice, I choose toned cards over ones with handling flaws such as dinged corners and edgewear.

Stray Marks:For whatever reason, many cards have stray printer marks, streaks, spots from an imperfect printing process. They come out of the pack this way, take em or leave em. Again, I prefer cards with these qualifiers over handling flaws.

Roller Marks:This is tough to show in a scan. Most often found in later series sets, these "pock marks" were probably caused by some kind of rolling machine in pressing the stickers. This is clearly a factory flaw, can come from the pack this way so falls into the qualifier category as far as I am concerned.

In general, this is a highly discretionary area. Personal preferences will vary widely here

Examples of Image issues: