Cardboard Gold

The holder a grading company names, with no published size

Every other holder documented on this site has a measurement attached to it. The Card Saver 1 does not. The size field on its own product page reads “Most 1952 to Date Sports and Trading Cards”, which is a description of what it fits rather than a dimension, and no figure in inches or millimetres appears anywhere on the page.

The only sizing the company offers is relative. The Card Saver 1 is described as “slightly oversized for easy insertion and removal”, and the Card Saver 2 page positions itself as “slightly smaller than the Card Saver 1”. You can establish an ordering from that, and nothing else.

No plastic is named either. The pages say “plastic” and “the highest clarity plastic”; the Card Saver types article adds “archival safe” without naming a polymer or a standard. There is no PVC, polypropylene or PET statement for any Card Saver.

The consequence is worth stating plainly, because this site cites the manufacturer for every figure it prints: any Card Saver 1 measurement you find is a retailer’s or a collector’s, not the maker’s. We are not going to print one. The most used semi-rigid holder in the hobby, and the one a grading company names by product, has no published specification.

What the other four sizes publish

The rest of the range is specified normally, which makes the gap at the Card Saver 1 more conspicuous rather than less.

The Card Saver 2 is 3 × 4 inches plus a 1/2 inch lip, at 9 mil, and its page states in capitals that it is not the size for grading company submissions. The Card Saver 4 is 4 1/2 × 7 1/8 inches including the lip, for items up to 4 × 6 inches, and the company states PSA has relied on the Card Saver 1 and the Card Saver 4 since it started grading in 1991. The Card Saver 5 is 3 1/2 × 7 3/4 inches including the lip, for currency and tickets up to 3 × 7 inches, and opens at the top like the rest.

For the Card Saver 3 we are not giving you a length. The product page states 3 1/3 × 5 1/2 inches including the lip; the company’s own Card Saver types article states 3 1/3 × 5 7/8 inches including the lip. Two Cardboard Gold pages, two numbers, three-eighths of an inch apart. Where a manufacturer contradicts itself the honest thing is to report the contradiction rather than quietly pick the one that looks right.

• Card Saver 2: 3 × 4 in plus a 1/2 in lip, 9 mil — explicitly not the grading size
• Card Saver 3: for tall cards; length given as both 5 1/2 in and 5 7/8 in on the maker’s own pages
• Card Saver 4: 4 1/2 × 7 1/8 in including the lip, for items up to 4 × 6 in
• Card Saver 5: 3 1/2 × 7 3/4 in including the lip, for currency and tickets up to 3 × 7 in

Nine mil is the holder wall, not the card

The one thickness figure Cardboard Gold publishes for the Card Saver line is 9 mil. It sits in the Card Saver 2’s size field and appears again as a line-wide description on the Card Savers category page: “9 mil, super clear, industry standard quality plastic”.

A mil is a thousandth of an inch, which is the same unit as a point. Nine mil is 0.009 inches. The trap is that it measures a different thing: it is the thickness of the holder’s own plastic, not the thickness of card the holder accepts. Every rigid holder elsewhere on this site is sold by the card thickness it takes, so the unit looks familiar and means something else here.

Cardboard Gold publishes no point rating for any Card Saver. If you need to know whether a thick card will fit, the usable figure is PSA’s own: its semi-rigid holders are stated to fit cards up to 2½ × 3½ inches and up to 35 points.

The sleeves are where the material is named

Everything the Card Saver pages leave unsaid about material, the soft sleeve pages say outright. The category page describes the range as “PVC free and made of clear OPP (oriented polypropylene)”, and the standard sleeve is published at 2 5/8 × 3 5/8 inches in 2 mil polypropylene, made since 1986.

Oriented polypropylene is polypropylene, and conservation guidance lists polypropylene among the plastics that are stable in long-term contact with printed material, unlike PVC. So on the sleeves the material question is answered in the form that can actually be checked; on the Card Savers it is not answered at all.

One sentence on the sleeve page is also the closest thing to a Card Saver 1 dimension the company publishes. The sleeves are stated to fit “our regular 3x4 top-loaders and in our Card Savers for standard size cards, the Card Saver 1 or 2”. That is a compatibility statement rather than a measurement, and it is what you have.

Toploaders, sold by point and by millimetre

The toploader range is the best-specified thing on the site, because each size is published with both its point rating and the width of its opening in millimetres. That second figure is unusual and it is the one that settles fit.

The standard 3 × 4 holder is listed as “30/35 Point Standard for Regular Cards”. Above it, the 60 pt holder has a 1.5 mm opening and is described for cards 35 to 65 pt; the 100 pt holder has a 2.5 mm opening for cards 80 to 110 pt; the 190 pt holder has a 5 mm opening. The range continues to 240 pt at a 7 mm opening.

Notice that the names and the usable windows do not line up: a holder called 60 point is described for cards from 35 pt, and one called 100 point for cards from 80 pt. The number in the name is nominal and the sentence underneath is the specification. Read the description, not the label.

Material is the familiar gap. The category describes “a hard plastic that is rigid with very little bend” and the 190 pt page says “inert rigid plastic”. No polymer is named for any toploader, as with the Card Savers.

The company also publishes its own account of when to use which, and it matches what the grading side of this site says: the Card Saver I for storing, mailing and submitting for grading, toploaders for display, thick cards and rigid protection. It repeats PSA’s position that “PSA advises against submitting in top loaders, hard acrylic cases or screw down holders”, recommends a soft sleeve inside a toploader, and suggests propping a Card Saver open with a finger while inserting a card so the card meets less friction.