Trading card sorter and methods

A method for sorting trading cards having a border, comprising:

• imaging with two scan bars in a card sorter along a transport path from an input to an output bin top and bottom surfaces of a plurality of trading cards in the card sorter to receive scanned images of pixels therefor;
• cropping out the pixels of the scanned images corresponding to the border thereby leaving rows and columns of pixels corresponding to ones of the pluralities of trading cards;
• hashing the rows and columns of pixels corresponding to said ones of the pluralities of trading cards;
• comparing the hashing to pluralities of reference hashes stored in a local or remote database available to a controller of the card sorter;
• and
• based on a hamming distance between the hashing and the reference hashes, providing results of various criteria regarding the ones of the pluralities of trading cards.