"A 2000 Bowman Chrome Tom Brady rookie card as seen through the CT scanner. (Image provided by Industrial Inspection and Consulting)"
Excerpts from an article in The New York Times:
For most of its history, buying and selling packs and boxes of trading cards was a game of chance with neither the buyer nor the seller knowing the results.“The product is designed to be a mystery,” said Keith Irwin, the general manager of Industrial Inspection and Consulting.And if it wants to stay that way?“They’ll need to find new packaging solutions,” he said.IIC went from a company focusing primarily on industrial X-rays and CT scans within the medical and aerospace fields to potentially taking the cover off the trading card industry without taking the cover off any product at all. And in the process, they say, their company — with no prior connections to the trading card industry — has earned thousands of satisfied customers in the collectibles space. All electing for a sneak peek at their cards before tearing the packs or boxes open, circumventing the mystery that has long been a central element of these products.The service caters to high-end products manufactured by Topps, Panini and Upper Deck, with the technology best suited to reveal cards in densely packed configurations. Take a 2023 Panini Flawless Football First Off The Line case for instance. Each case comes with two boxes. Each box comes with one pack of 10 cards. At $15,000 a case, it certainly makes economic sense that collectors are willing to pay IIC the going rate of $650 per case of that product to get a CT scan and see whether there’s something inside that they want, or to keep the package sealed and sell it on to someone else.
Salient discussion at the link re the ethics and economics of this practice. Just the existence of this technology and the possibility that packs have been non-invasively scanned can really crater the asking price for "unopened" packs of cards.