What you need,
and what is worth buying

System requirements

A graphics card is genuinely optional. It makes the 3D viewer, the depth map and the super-resolution upscale faster, and changes nothing else. The program has a requirements check built in that reports what your own machine actually has, rather than making you guess from this table.

Storage is the one people underestimate. Coin photography at full resolution is large, and a zoom survey is dozens of frames of one coin. A few hundred coins photographed properly is a serious number of gigabytes. Plan for it, and back it up, because a coin you have sold cannot be rephotographed.

Choosing a microscope

Almost any USB microscope will work, because the program speaks the standard Windows camera interface rather than a manufacturer driver. What separates a good one from a frustrating one is not magnification. It is these, roughly in order of how much they will affect your day:

Working distance

How far the lens sits above the coin at focus. Too short and there is no room to get light in between, which is fatal, because lighting is most of coin photography. Anything that forces the lens within a centimetre or two of the surface will fight you forever.

Focus you can control finely

A geared or rack focus beats a friction barrel by a wide margin, and it is the difference between a focus series that works and one that does not. Focus stacking and the 3D-from-series tool both need you to step focus smoothly through a range; you cannot do that by nudging a stiff sleeve.

Light you can move

A fixed ring light around the lens is the worst case for a coin, because it lights everything from every direction at once and flattens exactly the relief you are trying to see. A light you can move to one side, or a ring with segments you can switch, is worth more than any amount of extra magnification. Raking light is how a raised line is told from an incuse one, and you cannot rake with a fixed ring.

A stand that does not drift

At high magnification a millimetre of sag ruins a focus series. A heavy stand with a locking column is unglamorous and matters more than the camera on top of it.

Sensor resolution, last

It is the specification most prominently advertised and the least important of these. A sharp image from a modest sensor beats a soft one from a large sensor every time, and the interpolated megapixel figures quoted for cheap scopes are frequently not real pixels at all.

Lighting, which is most of it

You can improve your photographs more by changing the light than by changing anything else. Two things to try before buying anything:

• Move the light off-axis. A single light low and to one side rakes across the surface and throws shadows that reveal relief. Straight-on light kills it.
• Diffuse it. A bare LED produces hard specular glare that blows out lustre. A sheet of printer paper or a translucent cup between lamp and coin costs nothing and is frequently the single biggest improvement anyone makes.
• Kill reflections from the room. Copper and silver are mirrors. A dark surround stops your ceiling from appearing in the fields.
• Keep the background matte and dark. It helps the program find the coin's edge for diameter measurement, and it keeps stray light out of the picture.

Things that are not required

You do not need a copy stand rig, a polariser setup, a calibrated colour target or a photometric light dome to get value from this. They all help, and the program will use a photometric light set if you have the means to make one, but the ordinary case is a USB scope, a movable lamp and a dark mat.

Calibrate once

If you want measurements in millimetres rather than pixels, you need one known length. A stage micrometer is the accurate option and is inexpensive. A steel rule works. A coin of known diameter works, though less precisely, because the coin in your hand is not exactly nominal. Do it once per magnification setting and the program remembers.