Kodak Zd710 + Copy Stand + Jansjo Initial Test Results

A few more shots with a "full-acid" Buffalo nickel:





I lowered the lights by about an inch near the coin.

Cool copy stand, and I love that medal of cabinet of medals! My only comment on your technique is your lights are at too low an angle vs the coin surface. Notice how all the devices on the coins have bright edges. This shows that the lights are reflecting off the edges of the coins rather than the top surfaces, which would result in shadows on the edges of the devices, a more natural "look". Try bringing the lights up as high as you can, even to the point of them literally being between the camera and the coin. This will give a better presentation and less emphasis on surface conditions...

It seems to do well with larger items, hence why that medal picture is miles above the others. I took your advice about the light angles, it worked wonders already. I'm still tweaking with the manual settings of my camera - it's not a great camera. I'll post more test shots in a few minutes.

Seems I'm struggling with capturing detail - the 1867 nickel has 90% flawless lines, but in the picture they look like a muddled mess. Is that something I can tweak or is that a camera limitation?

While it's not a bad picture, I would never use it to say, sell that coin. The detail is very poorly represented, as several small dings which might matter are... "washed" away. I still need to tweak.

I was cropping it, would you advise against it?

I also tried getting it closer to the coin itself, it got a bit better. I'm also experimenting with a really crappy set of macro filters, I'm hoping I can do something with them. I have to take a break, this is all I've been doing since I got home from work 3 hours ago, and all I have in me since about 8 AM this morning is 2 Ramen noodles and about a half pack of cigarettes. I need to take a break. I'm invigorated though, I will keep going until I get this set. Excellent advice so far gentlemen.

I got the copy stand from Adorama, I believe it was around $135. It seems pretty solid thus far, I'm no expert, but the overall quality of the stand seems fairly sound. It's not unbreakable, but it's hefty, and seems like it would support a camera much larger than mine.

Lighting on the nickel is much improved vs earlier shots (except the medal, which is pretty nice) but is still a bit uneven. You might try a little diffusion, maybe a tissue over each light, to even it out a bit.

As the Captain said, major cropping is not good for image quality. Most cameras and lenses don't have great detail at pixel level, so it's better to downsize the image versus cropping it. This means getting closer to the coin to make it fill more of the screen. Downsizing creates "artificial sharpness" in the image by eliminating diffraction, lens aberrations, etc.