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Message:: [QUOTE="kanga, post: 2230629, member: 9270"]SuperDave, thanks for your comments and suggestions. After shooting 4 half dimes at my current settings I'm confident that it's my manual focusing that's the problem.The resulting images were quite varied with regard to focus. I've had trouble in the past with autofocus; that's why I do manual now.Autofocus often would image the scratches on the holder but the coin would be blurry.I blame that on depth of field, especially when I was using f4.5 or wider.For a while it was so bad, even with manual focus, that a coin's center was nicely done but the rim area was blurry.That's when I figured out I was WAY too close to the slab; the geometry was the culprit. I do one other thing that I haven't mentioned yet.I restrict the point of the light meter reading to the center of the coin.That affects the exposure time and I think makes the image close to real for the coin.I don't want other lighting (such as from the whitish insert of an NGC slab) to affect the exposure. As for RAW, I'll leave that for the REAL pros.That format creates huge files and is best for further editing.[/QUOTE]