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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;John Burgess, post: 4869890, member: 105098&quot;]hey Jay, here&#039;s the harsh reality.</p><p>You are looking for a needle in a haystack. LOL, for real though it&#039;s like that, you may get your lightning strike or jabbed in the hand, or you may check a million coins and come up empty time and time again. I&#039;m not a fan of the coin microscopes at all, in a lot of cases the magnification is way too much. people use them and they put the coin flat. However, normally it&#039;s just coins that caught their eye, caught their loupe or magnifier next, and then they want to look at it at high magnification. Most people aren&#039;t using it as a catch all if that makes sense. it&#039;s when the 3x-4x-10x just won&#039;t do and they know something is there than needs to be looked at. Others may have a varying opinion on it&#039;s usage.</p><p><br /></p><p>die varieties, doubled dies, RPMs, Error coins even like double struck, offcentered, brockages, all very few and far between when you consider the amount of everything that is out there that ISN&#039;T it, while the machine doubling striking events of little to no value are all really common.</p><p><br /></p><p>Coin graders are going to use their eye first and an incandescent desk light between 60 and 100 watts, a dark room and the desk lamp as fixed directional lighting, one source of lighting in the room.</p><p>&nbsp;they will hold the coin in their hand and tilt it rotate it and look at it with their eye from different angles under the light and check for luster, defects, and anything else they will need a closer look at, they max out at about 3x, 4x, 7x magnification for general grading. This tilting and rotating generally reveals what is shadow or lighting/reflection doubling as the shadow moves, but everyone has their way of doing things, for grading it&#039;s pretty much a standard.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now, if they are looking for small errors or varieties that need attribution, or counterfeits, they will likely pull out the big gun magnifiers, 10x, and a 20x just in case, usually 10x is enough but sometimes they go deeper.</p><p><br /></p><p>As far as the lighting. Ambient light multiple light sources generally will cast shadows from different directions or multiple directions at once depending on how many light sources. With one light source&nbsp; from one direction, you get a consistent lighting every time, over and over,&nbsp; and know the movements needed for dings, scratches, doubled lettering edges to catch the light in order for those spots that need closer examination to &quot;flash&quot; with reflected light. Fluorescent, Halogen or LED light in general is too &quot;bright&quot; and &quot;cold&quot; and will wash out detail, or flood the coin surface.</p><p><br /></p><p>incandescent lightbulbs are going the ways of the dinosaurs though, hard to find now. The one in your picture is way too bright and cold, BUT many people do use the light on the microscope. I will just say a desk lamp, a 75 watt incandescent bulb as the light source and an otherwise dark room and you will see what I&#039;m talking about. it is literally the best to view coins over any other lighting in my opinion even compared to sunlight outside which can be too bright.</p><p>Not sure if you have light settings on the microscope light, but if you do, turn it down to low, if you can change it to warmer light maybe, and kill the ambient lighting in the room when using it and you might find it easier on the eyes and better viewing and contrast/color on the screen.</p><p><br /></p><p>Above the first 5 pictures are fantastic, #3 and #5 might need a bit more focus but not too bad at all,&nbsp; the last two are flooded with light, but they are sharply in focus. the pictures strain my eyes, it&#039;s got to be worse for you in person.</p><p><br /></p><p>coin hunting varieties like doubled dies is easy, finding them is the hard part, from what I can tell, you aren&#039;t missing anything, you just haven&#039;t come across one yet in your search. your second guessing is wishful thinking and hope. The truth be told,,,,,, I&#039;ve never found one. I&#039;ve found a lot of other things, but never a true doubled die or even an RPM and I&#039;ve been looking for about 40 years off and on with my free time. Cuds, misaligned die strikes, 1998 and 2000 WAM cents, a lamination once in a blue moon, never a DD or RPM though.</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m long winded, but nothing is really simple, there&#039;s always variables. A coin microscope person that relies on it heavily may have another opinion about it. It&#039;s not really my thing at all, If I can&#039;t see it with 7x or lower, it&#039;s not worth the effort to me. but I also don&#039;t hunt for every variety in the cherry pickers, wexlers, coneca and varietyvista either. other people do try to &quot;catch em all&quot; like pokemon.</p><p><br /></p><p>by the way, those guys on youtube, the ones that are like &quot;what&#039;s this? Let&#039;s slap in under the coin microscope for a better look&quot;.&nbsp; that&#039;s staged, they know already exactly what it is, have the scope all tuned in and ready to put on a show. they aren&#039;t fishing, they bought it online. LOL it&#039;s a lot like the slot videos, you know darn well they aren&#039;t getting back to back to back handpays, or wining every time, they are losing just like everyone else but putting on a show with what they do have for wins. nobody wants to watch the reality of a week of searching 20 boxes of pennies and coming up empty even if they condense it down to 10 minutes or less.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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