What Camera do you Use to take those Clear Crisp Images of your Coins?

Without accessories, the lens only focuses to a little under a foot which is not close enough for small coins. You can get extension tubes or really cheap close up lenses cheaper than a real macro lens. Quality with tubes would be acceptable. There is another answer: live with it. The image below is not cropped but I did move the reverse image to the same frame as the obverse and reduce the size to fit here. This was shot with the 18-55 old model (not as sharp as the one they sell now) on the original 6MP Digital Rebel. Your 15.1MP T1i should do about twice as well.
AE3 about 18mm diameter at .9ft at 55mm


Below is the same image cropped to remove the excess black but not reduced in size. You can see some unsharpness here but remember ths is the old camera and old lens so the new one should be better.
http://www.pbase.com/dougsmit/image/121076953/original
I had to post a link to the big image here because Coin Talk doesn't allow a photo that large. You can see it on my pBase page or trust me. It's OK but not great.

Now in all honesty, most people won't want a photo that large and the T1i image will be twice as big so I reduced the above image to 800 pixels wide and a lot of the unsharpness was lost in the process.



Could you do better with a set of extension tubes? Yes. ...with a real macro lens? Certainly!!! Can you live with this quality (or actually with twice this quality since the T1i has 15 megapixels compared to the above sample shot with 6 megapixels)? You decide. The limiting factor here is the coin and my lighting technique. I should have picked a sharper coin and spent a while playing with it but the point here was that it can be done and this is what you can get with little effort and no special accessories other than the camera kit and a tripod. (Would it be inappropriate to mention that you may want to practice a little?) The lens is not the weakest link in this chain.

 

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Nikon D60 with a Sigma 180mm lens, two 13W OTT-LITES, and a heavy copy-stand:

 

Does anybody make a modern digital bellows system? That used to be my weapon of choice for may macro situations and it just occurred to me I've never such an offering in the digital world.

 

Novoflex makes one for $809.50 (B&H Photo price) that retains auto diaphragm features of the lens. For that price, you can buy a very good macro lens that will be much easier to use and allow shooting whole coins as well. The minimum bellows thickness will require a long focal length to even shoot as far back as 1:1.

Being a cheapskate, I use a 1970 vintage M42 Pentax screw thread bellows (newer ones are cheaply available on eBay) with manual diaphragm. I have used it with an old enlarging lens but the sample below is an old Pentax Takumar 50mm f/4 macro reversed. Currently there is one on eBay at $16.50 so we are not talking over $100 for bellows, lens and adapters. The sample is a detail of the Capricorn from a standard of a Legionary denarius of Septimius Severus (193 AD):


Note in my hurry to shoot this image I failed to dust off the red lint from the flocked tray in which I keep the coin. At this magnification, you need to work cleanly. This image is not cropped (but reduced to fit here) and is half way extended on my bellows. Only you can decide if the Novoflex is worth the difference to you.