eMoviePoster.com

What do I mean by the above? First, it's important to define the type of collector you are. If you are primarily interested in investment, I advise you to be very careful about buying too many similar items, as your best "investment strategy" is to diversify over a wide range of types of items, so you are not "putting all your eggs into one basket". Of course you don't have to be an "investor" to just want to not make "bad buys", items that almost certainly will be worth the same or less years from now as what you just paid! Basically, there are certain easily recognizable types of posters that never seem to go up in value (and often are very hard to sell).

1. Items in bad condition. I'm not talking about items with minor defects, I'm talking about items with major defects. Most people are not happy with much lesser condition, and won't buy it at any price. So there is a huge disparity between the price of something in "very good to fine" condition and the price of something in "good" condition. This sometimes lures people into buying much lesser condition (because of how much many they are "saving", but they often later regret it). Of course you can restore the item, but often you don't even raise the value enough to reflect the cost of restoration. My advice is to forget buying much lesser condition (or heavily restored items) unless it's a one-of-a-kind item that you likely won't find anywhere else.

2. Reissues (especially duotone versions of the originals) The whole reason most people collect posters is for the originality aspect; otherwise they would probably buy repros. Most will not buy a reissue at any price. So reissues with much lesser images often sell for a huge discount to the price of the original poster. This was true in the late 1960s when I started collecting, and have no doubts it will be likely be true another 50 years from now. (Of course there is the rare exception, such as Pride of the Yankees or The Hustler, but these ARE clear exceptions). I would say you shouldn't buy a reissue unless it is a title you really love and can't possibly hope to get as an original, OR if the reissue has a completely different image from the original.

3. Posters that are "red hot" I'm thinking of posters from brand-new VERY popular titles. When Titanic first came out the one-sheets were selling for $300 each, and now they sell for a fraction of that. Why not consider looking at areas that have seen some price reduction over the past decade, or those that may have not been discovered yet, because maybe some of those will do far better than the red hot posters in the long run.

Of course everything is relative to the price. If you are offered any of the above types of posters at extremely low prices, I would say to buy them immediately. I'm just trying to point out some reasons why certain posters probably won't appreciate much in value over time.