1998 Bowman Chrome Football Forum

How can you tell if you have a refractor or not? Also how do you know if it is a preview or not?

Simply put, if you look at the card under good lighting and tilt it back and forth, a refractor will have a rainbow effect to the reflection (think something similar to the shine you get from motor oil on a puddle).  A base chrome card will not.  Not sure about previews...

Thank you

Also, for this release they put the word Refrector right under the card number to help differentiate

That's cheating!  

Seriously, though, I wish card companies would start making a habit of *ALWAYS* identifying the parallel set to which a card belongs on the card itself.  It took a while for me to get it figured out when Topps had Chrome and Refractors and Xfractors and Superfractors and... and then sometimes even the color parallels are difficult or confusing to place.  I know a few years ago (2018?), the Donruss Optic football set had both blue and aqua parallels (the blue was a royal blue), but the autographed rookie cards only had a "Rookie Autographs Blue" version.  The problem was teh color matched the base set AQUA parallel, not the BLUE parallel.

jimetal7212 wrote:

Also, for this release they put the word Refrector right under the card number to help differentiate