I do not have any thing at the moment and it will be early next year when I will take the plunge and buy something. What, not sure yet, I will do some more research. I also collect stamps so I will see which is best for me and my need. Thank you for the info.
I should think a flatbed scanner would be suitable for flat items like printed matter, philatelic intaglio, etc. while a camera is more suitable and better for dealing with controlled lighting when shooting coins and properly capturing their character, colors and so on.
My Canon Powershot (SD 1200 IS) served me well for years. A nice compact 'point and shoot' with macro capability and it won't set you back a whole bunch o' jing.
Mark's book and his website were a great gift to the hobby. He made it easy for average folks to learn the important parts of imaging coins. Without going back and looking, I know he teaches the importance of practice. You don't need a $1000 setup. You can capture nice images from even a simple camera if you take the time to learn the camera and do lots of practice. I love the way this site handles images. You can upload almost any image and have options as far as the way it is shown. I like the full image option. Folks don't have to click on anything to see the image in my post. It's faster for me not having to load it to a different host and having to go find the link and post it here.
I wrote this earlier and forgot to post... Scanners can be okay in a pinch, but they're generally a poor overall choice for coin imaging. Certain phones are capable of producing rather impressive results these days, but as with a camera or any tool, knowing how best to use it is key. Do understand though that many of the photos you may have seen were taken using equipment beyond just a camera (dedicated lighting, tripod/copystand, etc, etc), but fine results can still be achieved with a basic camera, understanding how to use it, and a little imagination. There are tons of past imaging threads, both here and on other forums, plus websites dedicated to coin photography that may be helpful. Keep searching.
There are a large number of very good answers to your main question. The answers to them can be better framed when you factor the type of images you wish to create, and the type of budget you want to employ. A truism generally true elsewhere is quite in force here: There is quality, price and ease of use involved here. You can have any two of the three. Stamps are, in my experience, a much easier job than coins, so anything you choose for coins will serve admirably for stamps. For whole-coin images (and somewhat-closer detail images), there are smartphones out there capable of creating coin pics I'm willing to grade from. Just about any iPhone, properly employed (I and others would be happy to teach you), can do this. Certain Samsung Galaxies (that I'm sure of from experience) can. There are also point-and-shoot cameras out there capable of similar results. It's an odd situation, though - the newer the camera, the less-likely you are to run into one which serves the purpose well enough. For our (coin photography) needs, less-complex lenses and sensors are by far preferable. These days, everyone's trying to cram stupid zoom ability and huge numbers of megapixels into small cameras. Jack-of-all-trade lenses are just not sharp enough for our purposes, too many megapixels means individual pixels on the sensor are so small it's impossible to focus on them sharply enough. Some few of them still succeed for our purposes due to the sophistication of the in-camera processing software and quality of the particular lens design created for it. If you're just interested in coin photography with one of these, a well-selected used unit is your best bet. Look for something between 5-10MP(max, sensor sizes haven't changed, just the number of ever-tinier pixels crammed onto them), with no more than 4x optical zoom, preferably 3x. This makes for a nice, simple, sharp lens. All of the major brands making cameras in this class then - Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Minolta even) can surprise you with their quality. Cameras like these can be found for less than $50 on Ebay. The tradeoff here - with all of them - is ease of use. Smartphones can be somewhat easier, but either will teach you about lighting and camera placement before you coax good images from them. Precision is necessary. And you're going to be very close to the coin, an ease-of-use issue as it removes lighting options. You can expect only one magnification - however big the picture is, is how big it is, and whatever detail you can coax from it at full size is all you get. Their "sweet spot" is narrow, and you have to find it. On the other end, where the tradeoff is "cheap," lie the dedicated dSLR's with bespoke macro lenses costing $5-600 (just the lens). Ease of use is right up there because they're so good they're difficult to screw up. These are capable of creating images so huge that they're good for many detail blowups just because they're so large in the first place. There are a large number of USB microscopes out there which provide perfectly decent results for detail imaging, doubling and the like. Prices range from less than $50 to $250 or more, although at that latter level there are better suggestions. Some of these scopes - not all - are also capable of imaging full coins. The tradeoff is quality; the best of them are "serviceable" by comparison to more expensive solutions, quite usable here at CT, but the worst among them are more harm than good. Ease of use is all over the map, so be careful when you hear about some unit being panned possibly by someone who never figured out how to zero it in. Any dSLR camera, even used ones, can serve as the basis for a rig which can do all of the above at precise professional quality levels. If you already own a dSLR it's possible to play with lenses you may already have laying around by reversing them or adding spacers, and come up with an excellent coin camera. At the very outside of the "ease of use" spectrum (in one sense) is a solution relatively inexpensive (for the results) which will give you no excuse not to be as good as the best coin photographers here, employing a dSLR and bellows. It can be used with any type of lens from "regular" camera lenses to film duplicating lenses (the amazing sweet spot of quality and cheap) to microscope objectives and magnification is infinitely varied by the bellows to optimize the capability of whatever lens you're using. Many members whose work you admire around here are using such systems, as they're by far the cheapest, most flexible way to professional results. The tradeoff for pro-level capabilities for less than $500 soup-to-nuts is you're going to become a photographer to use it. Ain't no "Auto" here.
I have yet to read Mark Goodman's book but it's very high on my want list because numismatic photography is a budding hobby of mine. I get lots of pleasure from successfully capturing a coin a sharing it! It's a whole new way to "play" with your coins! The articles by Doug Smith are just great and by following his advice/method is how I take my photos.
A couple of other points to consider if you're going the camera route is does it come with software that allows you to tether it to your PC. This lets you to run the camera, change settings, lighting, ect and see instant results on the PC. An AC power adapter is also a necessity.
You'll only find tethering with Canon & Nikon dSLR's and some earlier Canon point-and-shoots (the Axxx range up to the A650), and a few older Fuji point-and-shoots if you can find the Hyper-Utility software. There are plugins to Adobe Lightroom which allow tethered shooting with other brands. I will only use and recommend Canon equipment, but I was waiting for the OP to express an interest in the dSLR route before I hit him with that.
I'm getting a camera today with a gift certificate that I got for Christmas, but these images were done with my iPhone and the free download of photoscape. Though my lighting could be better, descent images can be accomplished on a budget of zero with a little practice.
I was about to endorse the same https://www.cointalk.com/threads/photo-editing-and-presentation-with-photoscape.175157/
They gave you the perfect thread. I never actually read that, I just struggled through until I figured it out. I just use the editor and do "round crop" with a black background, then I do combine to put obverse an reverse together and then add a 10-15% reflection. It's pretty simple and the thread really helps.
