There's a new Kickstarter project that claims you can take high quality photos of up to 30x-300x, using a slim attachment. Maybe it'll be good for taking pictures of your coins if the phone's optical zoom is good. I currently use a 30x loupe and a USB microscope, so this would be redundant. Maybe it'll be an improvement. Thoughts? Anyway, here's the link to the project: http://kck.st/1XYr4Ag
If you're 'smart' you won't use a 'phone'. Only one guy I know that uses a smartphone and takes decent pictures.......@WingedLiberty. He takes pictures of coins (with a smartphone) like nobody's business......
There's an upper limit, forced by the laws of physics, to what can be done with a tiny smartphone camera sensor. Note that this design depends on the phone itself for any "magnification" over the initial 40x ("smartphone zoom;" smartphones don't have optical zoom). It's worth a look if only because of what Olloclip has done for iPhones, which are already good enough to shoot gradable coin images. Honestly I expect Olloclip to do a magnifier for Android phones soon as well.
You need a hand as steady as a rock, and the higher the magnification, the harder it is to get a good clear photo. Chris
Go back and look at the pili ( hairs on the insect). If they look sharp to you at any magnification, look again. Anyone who has used a real microscope knows it can't deliver. Perhaps for a whole coin, but 99% of the photos that will show up here will be by the variety hunters. Also digital magnification is software guessing what the missing information show be, not whether there is real doubling there or not. Even a cheap point-and-shoot will do many times better.
Smartphone pics are one step above Polaroids. If you don't believe it, go check out the ones I've posted.
Go look at my pics. They're all from a Samsung Note. It's one of the best camera phones out there... and acts like it
Same for us... we use a Note 4 for images of the whole coin. CAMERA Primary 16 MP, f/2.2, 31mm, OIS, autofocus, LED flash, check quality Features 1/2.6" sensor size, 1.12 µm pixel size, geo-tagging, touch focus, face/smile detection, panorama, HDR Video 2160p@30fps, 1080p@60fps, optical stabilization, dual-video rec., check quality
I'm unsurprised by the quality of some smartphone cameras; there are a few out there which can easily produce gradable images of coins. In conjunction with quality optics like Olloclip is doing, there's no reason why one cannot produce detail images of similar quality. Perhaps not as good as bespoke microscope units - optics is one technology where there's no substitute for money when it comes to quality - but certainly sufficient for evaluating doubling and the like. So that's my biggest worry about the Kickstarter project here, the quality of the optics they'll be using. The provided images are not remotely large enough to evaluate the thing in the context of numismatic imagery needs, although the ~$150 price point is sufficient to expect decent optics. Don't forget, smartphone camera sensors are tiny, and they require serious software coaxing to provide sharp images to begin with. The average phone camera sensor has pixels measuring about 1.2 microns; an 18MP Canon dSLR sensor's pixels (for example) measure about 4.3 microns. If anything, it requires sharper optics to achieve acceptable images from a smartphone than a dSLR lens. Yet the above is proof they're getting it right. The tradeoff is, with a smartphone one is dependent on the manufacturer's in-camera software, offering very little manual adjustment. If the phone can get it right, it can and that's all there is to it.
I'd like to expand on my mention and use of a designated traditional 30x loupe... It would be neat to have a "loupe" just to look at coins and other items, especially if you're going to have a phone in your pocket anyway. Although taking photos may be a key feature of this product, viewing the coins at 30x-300x magnification alone without necessarily taking any photos would be its most utilized function - I have a USB microscope that can snap photos and I spend more time looking at the magnified details than snapping photos. But all of this only matters if the Kickstarter project delivers on the quality they're claiming, and you have a minimally decent camera on your phone.
This is my weapon of choice at a show... the tablet and camera are on the outside of the locked case.
Yeah, I have a similar USB microscope setup that goes to 200x. It gets the job done. If the Kickstarter item can act as both a USB microscope and a loupe, all packaged in one slim profile, then it may be an attractive alternative.
