Camera specs for capturing color

gbroke, Quite an improvement! ...Mike

 

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EEW, I wager your already great photographs would get even better if you had a longer lens and got some more working distance allowing you to get your lights even "higher". I think you will prefer the look of the resulting photographs even more than the axial lit shots. Have you considered a longer lens? Just wondering...Mike

 

I have already decided on buying and trying the Tamron 150mm I have some other work to do first. I need to build a copy stand worthy - Thinking about a drill press column that cranks the table up and down with integral lighting. The 180mm puts the minimum distance to subject at about 20" which seems to much..

I also want to understand the the new sensors at 19mm and 24 mm tall. However I just recently found out the smaller sensors like whats in my 40d have the better pixel density and that the new sensors wer created for a larger field of view. I don't know how that translates to macro imaging.

Here is where I am at with that whole learning curve.

http://www.sphoto.com/techinfo/dslrsensors/dslrsensors.htm

 

Cameras get close, but will not capture all colors that the eye can see. I doesn't matter how many lights you use, how expensive the camera or anything else. Digital cameras use approximations for everything they do, then compression algorithms further result in losses.

 

The same thing applies for your eyes -- they approximate everything, they discard and invent huge amounts of information, and leave it up to your brain to make sense of it all.

 

In general, higher pixel density tends to raise the noise floor. However, this isn't a huge issue as even the noisiest of today's DSLR sensors (CMOS and CCD) are pretty good in this regard.

Given most macro (unlike telephoto) lenses possess very good to excellent edge-to-edge sharpness, the crop factor of a smaller sensor won't really give you much of an advantage either.

All things considered, I wouldn't worry too much about sensor size, in and of itself.

I would, however, focus on dynamic range -- that will make a huge difference in your ability to capture relative contrast and thus the quality of your (hopefully unretouched) photos.

 

Not all cameras use compression. Specifically, both Canon and Nikon provide for a completely lossless workflow (e.g. RAW). Of course, compression is applied when you save as JPG or other compressed image formats. But from the time the image is captured until the time it is saved in a compressed format (on the computer), virtually all new DSLRs support a lossless workflow without the shortcomings/artifacts/approximations that are introduced by lossy compression algorithms (like JPG).

Quibbling aside, your underlying point is a valid one -- cameras don't have as wide of a color gamut as the human eye, and being digitial in a world of analog means that there is an approximation made at the start of the process (e.g. a-to-d quantization).

 

This helped me the most! I started trying different color backgrounds with each coin. I also messed with the white balance and different positions with lighting. I feel I have made vast improvements since I tried these things. I will hold off on spending money on an slr for now! Thanks guys!
I was NEVER able to capture luster and the gold toning like I can now!
Check out these 3 images I took yesterday using suggestions from this thread and my cheapie camera!
http://www.cointalk.com/t158270/

Heres one from that thread if you dont care to look: This is untouched except for cropping. This is a near perfect representation of how the coin looks in hand.

 

I am glad to hear I am not totally useless. Thank you. BTW, been there and done that.

 

California has banned the 100 W incandescent bulb for sale, such as my favorite (REVEAL) brand. The max incandescent bulb is now 72W. Before the deadline, I bought a case of 24, not so much for coins, but for faceting and reading. I can't read well under a CFL or 60W candescent, so hopefully I will be OK. I can always go to AZ. Home depot or Lowes

Jim

 

Congrats! I know the feeling! Awesome!

This thread rocks and is worth a bump TTT