My wife is a manager at the local Target store and she sometimes finds some unusual coins. Last year one of her employees showed her a nickel that kept getting rejected from their coin sorter. My wife noticed that the back was "messed up" and the coin wasn't round, so she bought it from Target for a nickel and brought it home. She also noticed an odd 20 dollar bill a couple of years ago and it turned out to be a fairly nice 1928. She sometimes finds silver certificates, old two-dollar bills, and silver dollars and buys them from the cash office.:hug:
That brings up a good point. I've been trying to get good pictures of my coins and the ones I take look terrible compared to the pictures everyone here posts. How do you take such great photos of your coins? I tried scanning them on a high end HP Scanner and they come out "flat" and a little out of focus. I've tried using the color correction software that came with the scanner and it doesn't really help much.
Personally, I use the macro on my digital camera, for larger pieces, then photo show out the background. For smaller pieces, my wife has a 'supermacro' lens that is great, but you need good lighting. (Supermarco does not have a flash -- auto no-flash). Either way, I have to take a few pictures (with the flash & stuff) to get each one right.
What resolution did you use? I used 200/200 and the edges of the coins looked pixelated and choppy. The top of the coins are a little out of focus, but the bottom of the coin is sharply focused. I built a database in MS Access to organize my coins and I used an OLE field to store the images. The only way that I can get the images into the OLE field is to scan the coin first, open it in the Paint program that comes with Windows XP, save it as a bitmap, and then cut and paste the bitmap into the Access OLE Field. After all that, I get a pretty lousy looking picture and the database is huge after only scanning about 25 coins. I have over a 1000 foreign coins, so I realized last weekend that this isn't going to be a practical way to store the images. I'm going scan the images and store them on a DVD with a hyperlink in the database.
Believe it or not if you can find someone who has one, often a low end scanner will often work better on coins than a high end one. Scanners are really designed for documents, two dimentional items that rest flat on the glass. They have a tight focus and little depth of field. So three dimentional items that are not right on the glass can be a little out of focus. The low end scanners are a little "sloppier" and have a greater depth of field which allows them to capture images of things which aren't right against the glass.
