What Camera To Take Coin Pics?

Just about any modern digital camera will give you great results. Photography is about light, not the camera. Get a nice little tripod or copy stand (or make one) and a couple of lights (2 preferable, 3 is best). DSLR cameras will give you a little more to work with (lenses, macro tubes, etc), but your set up will influence the final results more.

Before attacking the "taking images" part, I think you should look into learning some sort of postprocessing software which would allow you to better prepare what you have for posting here. Yesterday's images suffered from a whole lot of excess airspace around the coins; had you placed the two closer together and cropped out all the excess space around them, you may have been able to show them far larger. I don't know what the original image size was, but the size you posted was an even downsizing of the camera's maximum image size so I'm thinking what you posted was a complete image without any cropping.

So, the point I'm making is that your camera is probably capable of perfectly decent images. Lets first get you up to speed with postprocessing so you can maximize that end, then we'll work on tweaking the camera itself. I don't know what specific software to recommend; I know there are free programs which will give you the capability but I use something a tad more complex which I wouldn't recommend to a beginner.

Let's let the membership come up with simple recommendations in that regard - you can probably Search this forum and get a good answer as well.

ACDSee should have the basic editing capability you need for the moment; since you have it, stick with it.

As regards the microscope, don't forget that optics is a price-driven technology - you get what you pay for. Members here are coming up with perfectly acceptable results using inexpensive microscopes, but don't expect to match the best efforts of people with far more expensive equipment. And don't expect to be using a microscope for full-face images of coins; although some microscopes have sufficient field of view to do so, many others don't and it'll be a source of frustration for you. Plan on the camera and microscope complementing each other, having specific roles. One for full-face images, one for details.

Always make sure you are saving your images in the highest quality possible in your camera, I shoot Canon DSLR and use nothing but RAW images to start with. Turn off any in camera effects, sharpening, etc. You can always do better after the fact of shooting, and sometimes the camera (especially sharpening) will make you shot less sharp since you may only be using a small crop from your original frame. Try to fill the area of view for the lens zoom you are using, either zoom in or move the coin closer to the lens, leaving lots of blank space means when you crop the coin you waste a lot of potential pixel that could have held data, and now you are trying to stretch fewer pixels even more after the crop is completed.

quote: "Just about any modern digital camera will give you great results. Photography is about light, not the camera."
- CARVE THAT IN STONE !

AND: the advice about tripod & timer will also advance you considerably along the path of happiness.

Oh, look, it's a 3998 Lincoln.

I don't know what that brown line signifies ( if anything )
I also have a few other nickles that are entirely this way on the reverse side ( oh that was a shot from the microscope)

This one was done with the little canon ( I really wish for a sharper image and a bit more zoom )