A friend sent me this and it's the niftiest thing. Picture looks clearer than my cheap 60x iphone attachment from Hong Kong too.
Rick, what are you talking about? All someone needs is a 10x-15x loupe to spot most doubled dies and RPMs. At 500x you are at the microscopic level...
Rick, here is an image of pollen (which is by itself nearly microscopic), under 500x magnification. http://www.oregonquarterly.com/spring2011/images/photo_upfront_pollen.jpg If you took a picture of a coin at 500x magnification, you wouldn't even be able to fit one whole letter inside the image. Where does Wexler ever say that he takes photos at 1800x?
What he is saying is in regards to the final image size. If you take a 10X lens on the cameras CCD type of photoplane, it will reflect 10X the objects true measurements. Then if you blow that up digitally from less than a inch or so to a 10" by 10" image on our computer screen, it reflects 10X multiplied by 100 ( 10 x10) or 1000X. This is how you see the USB cameras tout their X, but either way, they both are false magnification. Only the magnification of the actual object to recording media counts, Any increasing the print size doesn't count as true magnification of the object, but enlargement of the pixels recorded by the camera. One could take the coin under discussion and theoretically put it on a jumbo screen and make it a 1,000,000 times actual size but it would be just as lacking as currently. Here is my photo of the comparison of a morgan dollar surface ( left) with that of a peace dollar (right) at 400 X true magnification through a real microscope.
Magnification is just enlargement in a non technical world, magnification in a technical sense means higher resolution of a lens. I was in a *mart store selling a microscope for kids, it said 1200X on the box, but most is enlargement of a blurry low resolution objective lens. A 1000X microbiology scope has a 10X ocular and a 100 X objective, but the 100X only work with a oil or other solution which has the same RI as glass for resolution. None of these 'toy' 1000X, 1200, 1800 scopes do. I had to work hard to get enough light on the object shown above as such a lens is almost 1/8" from the specimen. I would think that most error variety people are using 10 -20 X loupes or 30-45X stereoscopes. However that shot reveals why Morgans can have such colorful natural toning while Peace are much less, and why such toning is limited to high grade AU-MS.
