I dont know but something tells me its polished, its very lustrous and shiny for the amount of wear on it
Same here! @SorenCoins Thanks for trying with new photos. The problem may be that you need a tripod or copy stand to stabilize the camera, but I don't know if one is available for a phone camera. Without one, it means that you need to maintain a super steady hand when taking your shots. Otherwise, when you enlarge the photo using zoom, the motion, no matter how slight, will be magnified. Chris
@SorenCoins Thanks for trying with new photos. The problem may be that you need a tripod or copy stand to stabilize the camera, but I don't know if one is available for a phone camera. Without one, it means that you need to maintain a super steady hand when taking your shots. Otherwise, when you enlarge the photo using zoom, the motion, no matter how slight, will be magnified.[/QUOTE] Or wait and take a picture in the sunshine. You'll have much better luck if you can get bright light on the coin. That lets the camera use a shorter exposure (which reduces motion blur), smaller aperture (which makes it easier to get everything in focus), and lower ISO (which reduces graininess).
An iPhone5 is capable of shooting coin images as good as anything short of a dSLR with a bespoke macro lens. iPhones are the very best of phone cameras, at least for coins. All you have to do is determine the minimum distance from which the camera will focus on the coin (no zoom), mount it stably - you can hang it off the edge of a box or something - and trigger the shutter remotely. Here's an example of what a guy on another forum is doing with an iPhone:
The problem with zoom on smartphone cameras is it's digital, not optical. The camera is not physically changing the optics for greater magnification, it's just computing what the coin *should* look like if it were larger on the sensor. There's only so many pixels on a camera sensor, and the phone's processor is arbitrarily adding more based on what it thinks ought to be there in order to make the image larger. Enlarging a coin image via digital zoom will always make for a less-detailed image, especially when done by the (relatively "dumb") processor in a smartphone by comparison to a desktop computer. If we use the Morgan I posted above as an example of the best the phone's camera can do (and that was shot with a 4S, although the 5's camera isn't a huge improvement), a Nickel should come out around 550 pixels in diameter, sharply-focused. About like so: Not huge, but large enough to get some information across. Of course, it's not an "Easy Button" operation - you'll have to fiddle with focus distance, lighting and getting the camera square to the coin - but your phone's camera ought to be able to produce images quite good enough to get your point across.