Copy stand arrived from Amazon the other day. Nice compromise between price and quality. Would have been nice to have some sort of gear mechanism to raise and lower the camera, but for $79 at least it has pretty solid construction. Easy to say when its new I suppose, guess we'll see if it lasts. That's a NEEWER macro LED lamp on the end of the lens, also cheap, $35 on Amazon. Works great on coins up to about a half dollar in size, not so great on larger coins.
I'm gonna build my own rig once I get a place... and after I get a macro lens, haha. The lens should set me back at least half of a quarterly bonus... ugh.
I went pretty cheap on that too. $285 for the cheapest macro Canon makes. 50mm and without the IS feature, but for my purposes it seems adaquate. I probably would have stuck with the macro setting on the camera, but in their infinite wisdom, they designed it so the LCD screen preview can only be used in the manual settings. If I use the automatic settings, --and macro is one of the automatics-- then I am forced to use the eyepiece to focus. Not sure if its like that on a Nikon SLR, but its one of the more irritating things about the T1i. The bigger problem being getting dandruf etc on coins from being hunched over the camera to focus. Only way around that is to buy a macro lens and then use the manual settings.
My girlfriend already has a few nice DSLR's, and one she lets me use regularly... and I want a nice lens. It's a Pentax camera, and from what I've seen, lenses that work with those tend to be a bit more pricey.
