Canon Powershot A1200

It does not appear to have much in the way of manual mode operation so it might be difficult to use for macro work. But if you can get it for super cheap you can try it out and not be out too much if it won't do the job. It looks like it sold for $80 when last available new.

I can get the camera @ $75 +tax(12%). Is that a good deal?
BTW, the store is closing down so no returns...:(

My current camera is a Canon PowerShot A800, and here is my latest picture with it.


The macro works good.

EDIT - here is an example

@Fuzzy: That's fantastic for a sub-$100 camera. Now I have a camera to recommend to folks on a budget who want to take coin pictures.

he is a picture of squatter on my 6x8 trailer. I was probably about 30 feet away. Scaling down to less than 100k makes it a bit less clear.

Those shots look pretty good, better than I expected for a $75 camera.

This is my setup, not great but it works for me.



the clear containers help cut down the glare from the lights. And there is a pen cup turned upside-down in the center that I place the coin on. I have been playing around with black, blue, or gray background. Black works for some coins, gray for others. You can see the camera mounting screw.

If you're going to use lamps of that type, your best bet is probably Compact Fluorescent bulbs in the Daylight spectrum. You'll see these bulbs sold by color - Warm White, Cool White, Bright White, Daylight and others depending on how the vendor designates them. What that describes is the "color temperature" of the bulb, the actual color of the light it sheds. This is measured in degrees Kelvin, using the same scale as astronomers use to describe the color of a star.

The lower numbers - usually from ~2800k to 5000k - have a more or less yellowish cast to the light. "Natural" and "Daylight" bulbs have a color temperature of 5000-6500k, meant to simulate actual daylight.

The reason this is important is, pretty much all point-and-shoot cameras are optimized for outdoor usage. As in, operation in color temperatures of 5000k+. Getting proper color from other color temperatures involves in-camera color correction, and cameras are more or less-successful at making that correction. Canon are notorious for imperfect color correction in the "tungsten" range, what you and I would describe as a "standard" light bulb whose color temperature is in the 2800-3500k range. This, of course, varies by camera but it's nice to be able to more or less forget about color worries, which are among the most common "newbie" difficulties when shooting coins.

The color temperature of your bulbs should be labeled on the package. If the bulbs you choose are closer to 5000k than 6500k, use the "Daylight" white balance setting on your A1200 (you'll need to run it in Program Mode for white balance adjustments to be available). If the bulb is closer to 6500k, use the "Cloudy" white balance setting. The highest-average color temperature outdoors is to be found on cloudy days rather than sunny; although the Sun constantly bombards us with every color temperature at once, atmospheric conditions tend to filter out the lower color temperatures, raising the "average" and clouds do the best job of filtering out those yellower colors.

There. I'm sure that was a whole_lot_more than you ever really wanted to know about color temperature.