photos of coins in cardboard flips

moursund

Do you find the mylar gives you glare, makes it harder to focus, or otherwise proves troublesome?
Do you tend to remove your raw coins from flips in order to photograph?

What about your slabbed coins?

am

JRocco

It causes some glare but you can still shoot a representative pic.

TurtleCat

It’s all in the angles really. It just takes a small change to make a big difference.

moursund

i suppose having a decent camera helps. Which most people have these days, because they drop a bundle on iphones and galaxy whatevers. I'm still trying to make do with a < $200 phone every few years.

am

moursund

so do you guys have a special spot on a table/desk whatever that you always use for coin shoots?

am

Jzyskowski1

I use an iPhone 7. Not anything new or fancy. A used one, 6 and up will work. The 7 and I just move around the office until I get a good shot. Sitting standing by the window on the coffee table. I am very happy with my pictures now. I also have a tripod camera stand. $10 eBay. Practice practice practice. I have learned to shoot through flips and slabs🤓

Jzyskowski1

Here’s a couple

moursund

What is with that freaking huge gold merc?

moursund

Related IC processing info:

For fabricating integrated circuits, photolithography equipment exposes a thin layer of photoresist with light projected through a photo mask onto the surface of the silicon wafer. Any dust on the surface of the photo mask will result in defects in the circuit. To protect the mask from dust, and the circuit from printable defects, a pellicle is attached to the mask frame.

"Pellicles are thin (~1 µm) polymer films stretched across a frame that is attached to the mask. Typical frame heights are 5–10 mm, with 6.35 mm a common value, the same as the thickness of the photomask blank. Particles deposited on the pelliclized photomask fall onto the pellicle, and are therefore several millimeters away from the chrome features that are being imaged. With small depths-of-field, these particles are not going to be in focus."

Similarly, if the plastic in the coin flip or slab was several millimeters away from the coin, and you had a shallow enough depth of focus, your camera would pretty much ignore any dust, scratches, or other imperfections in the holder.

am
(IC wafer fab yield engineer for a decade or so, now a software engineer)

TurtleCat

@moursund said:
so do you guys have a special spot on a table/desk whatever that you always use for coin shoots?

am

I have a 3 shelf bookcase and I put my copystand on top of that. It’s at a perfect height and shape for it. Room for three adjustable lights on the copystand as well. I use a scissor lift to help in adjusting the distance to the coin from the camera without having the mess with the setup as well.

Steven59

@moursund said:
{What is with that freaking huge gold merc? }

Looks like a 1oz Copper round ?

Jzyskowski1

Yes indeed. Copper

Mr_Spud

I use an iPhone 12 Pro now, but was using a 6S before that and getting decent results.

I use a table and have a section with lights set up and use a wide mouth bottle to set the phone on to take coin pictures.

The autofocus works great on raw coins but can be thrown off by any holder. I’d rather just take the coins out of their flips than have to do extra work. But for slabbed coins I can get the autofocus to work on PCGS slabbed coins, especially if I put oil on top of the plastic over the coin to make any scratches and even the slab itself invisible. But for NGC slabs no matter what the autofocus doesn’t work perfect. So now I’m experimenting with an app that allows manual focusing and I can get the camera to focus on the coin instead of the slab.

Treashunt

Personally, I find pictures of coin in the flips are useless.

It only takes a minute to take the picture, then put the coin in the flip, rather than the other way around

ricko

Android phone/camera....two years old....flourescent lamp on computer table top.... It is what it is.... Cheers, RickO