To sort of justify my approach, collectibles are a field I transparently don't know much about, apart from the occasional and sensationalist press article. The article left me casually curious, and I was suprised to find no such comment here. Still, I really didn't want to dive into yet another rabbit hole, so this felt like the perfect task to hand off to an LLM to serve me a rough estimate. It's a niche of thought I've come to gladly delegate to an LLM, have it quickly google sth for me.

>Sometimes the estimates are high, sometimes low; it just depends on the whims of the market.

That's probably the nature of the business. But doesn't that mean it more or less evens out on average? I mean, you gotta start somewhere with an appraisal like this.

FWIW, my experience with recent LLM models is that even free tiers are pretty capable of finding and aggregating information available on the internet, and doing some basic arithmetic with it. I may need to mention ChatGPT's answer was a lot more elaborate than the number I quoted. Possible scenarios ranged from a "conservative" $600k up to $1.5-2 million in the event of a bidding war between serious collectors at a premier house.

And frankly, considering how naive the question is, I suppose that guess isn't much worse than yours or mine, isn't it? I understand if you don't indulge in this kind speculation, though.

I personally do trust it a tiny bit more, actually, because it demonstrably did a modicum of due diligence by searching for comparable NES collectibles that were sold in the past, having a look at some collectors' roughly known budgets, and doing some numbers off the results. This is something Random Internet Stranger might or might not have done before just talking out of their ass.

Honest questions: After reading TFA, did you not wonder, just a bit, what the box could be worth? Would you have taken the time to respond to my post if I hadn't told the source and just said it's "probably" worth x, instead of saying "might, according to"?

It goes without saying that if anybody has any deeper knowledge or wants to spend more time on research, I'd appreciate a more professional estimate.

Good thing the owner talked to the author before putting them up for $15 each...

Not as bad as I would have thought, but I would still go OP's way if I wanted to do this.

These tools are made to remove burrs resulting from machining processes. They are very useful for quick&dirty jobs on bore holes or rough edges where optics don't matter, but they lack the precision for sensitive work.

Anybody who's not very well versed in using a deburring tool is just about guaranteed to produce a terrible result that will only take longer to sand out than approching the task with files and sandpaper from the start.