This caused me to do some idle thinking about volume imaging. I think, with my setup which is heavily-optimized towards this end, I could probably reach the quality level I'm accustomed to in about three minutes per coin. That's the total, from picking it up for the first time to saving a processed image that's ready to post online. Obviously, the shooting and postprocessing would be done as individual batches at differing times, and it's conceivable that I could do it a tad faster with Gimp scripting - although I doubt I could script a crop, everything else lends itself to a script.
So we'll call it two minutes per coin, 30 per hour flat-out. I would not apply skills I've taken years to learn for free; even with that kind of efficiency I'd still be wanting about $1 per coin.
At that rate, the cost of shooting 500 coins or a little more - if you're careful about your expenditures - will put you into imaging equipment every bit the equal of mine, and I will teach you how to use it all here in the forum, for free.
Just sayin'.
