Not just a microscope camera.
The whole coin bench.

Seven Looks at One Letter

As photographed, local contrast, a raking light you swing around, the outline alone, surface slope, a quiet map where anything normal goes black, and color change. Each one strips away a different distraction. Something that’s really there keeps showing up; a trick of the light shows up once and disappears.

Watch the Shadow Move

Swing the lamp and watch. A raised second impression throws its own shadow, and that shadow moves as the light goes around. A flat smear of shoved metal doesn’t. You’re not being told the physics, you’re watching it happen, which is how it finally makes sense.

Then the Shape

A cross-section cut straight across the spot shows you the shape: two crests of about the same height is what hub doubling looks like, one crest and a flat shelf is machine doubling. And when the two honestly look the same, it says so instead of guessing.

Roman Coins, Found by Their Legend

A Roman bronze rarely shows a date, and the mint mark is often worn away. What’s left is usually a scrap of the lettering, so that’s what you search on. Type the letters you can read and partial words still match: VICTORI finds VICTORIA.

52,054 Imperial types keyed to RIC, 2,602 Republican and 2,107 Byzantine, across 173 rulers and 81 mints. Built from the American Numismatic Society’s open typology, credited in the program, and searched offline.

Every Part of the World

The collection opens by area: Whole Collection, United States, Canada & Mexico, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, Central & South America, Caribbean, Ancient World and Tokens. Each area keeps its own count, cost and value.

Pick a country and the Period and Denomination lists fill in for it. Most of Europe, Russia, China, Vietnam, Japan, India, the Koreas and more are written out by hand with their periods, currencies and denominations; about 560 other countries and historical states come with their currencies, from Wikidata.

The Ancient World, on Its Own Terms

Ancient coins are filed by who issued them, not by a modern border, because nobody in Lydia was checking a map from 2026: Lydia and Ionia, the Greek city-states and kingdoms, Persia, the Roman Republic, Empire and Provincial issues, Celtic, Ancient India, Ancient China and Byzantium.

Each coin has a place for its ruler, its date as written (AH 1332, regnal year 12, undated), its obverse and reverse legends, and its references — RIC, KM#, Sear.

Numista, With Your Own Key

Look a coin up on Numista from inside its record, using your own free Numista key. The key is kept encrypted by Windows, and only the coin’s N# is saved; the details are shown marked “Source: Numista”, fetched when you ask and kept for no more than five days.

My Coins: Any Country, Any Size

Enter the specifications of any coin — diameter, weight, anything you know — and it joins the calibration list, the measuring tools and the counterfeit screen, marked “My Coins” so a figure you typed is never mistaken for a published one.

Measured Under Your Microscope

A world coin gets the same bench as a Lincoln cent: calibrated diameter in millimeters, the fifteen views of the surface, relief from a light set, the photos filed to the coin. Physics doesn’t care what country a coin came from, and neither does the caliper.

Tokens

Pick Token and you get 31 kinds to file under: Civil War and Hard Times tokens, transit, trade and casino tokens, Mardi Gras doubloons, love tokens, So-Called Dollars, elongated and encased coins, even wooden nickels.

Challenge Coins

Challenge coins get their own home too: every branch of the service, first responders, agencies, clubs and sobriety medallions.

Bullion and Private Mint Silver

Silver and gold bullion, commemoratives and private mint silver each have their own type, and melt value is worked out from the metal prices you set. It’s kept apart from what the coin is worth to a collector, because those are two different numbers.

Light It From Anywhere

Grab a real light. Your phone flashlight counts. Hold it low to one side, take a shot, move it around, take another. Each point on the coin brightens and dims as the lamp goes round, and from that the program solves the actual tilt of the metal at every pixel, then the height. That’s photometric stereo, it takes about a minute, and it uses stuff you already own.

For a bench where the light can’t move, there’s a virtual raking lamp you can swing around one photo. It’s a simulation, labeled as one, and it’s great for looking.

Fifteen Ways to Look

Relief, micro detail, doubling scan, crack scan, contour map, flow direction, heat map, depth map, edges, negative, solarize, polarize. A contour map draws lines of equal brightness, so doubling shows up as a second contour running alongside the first. Flow direction follows the grain the strike left in the metal. Every view works on the live feed and on photos you already saved, and measurements always come from the real pixels, never from the view.

Numbers, Not Impressions

A picture has no scale, but a coin does: its diameter is a published number. Pick the type and the program fits a circle to the rim, and now every pixel has a size. It takes several readings and refuses a calibration whose readings disagree by more than 0.8%; a good one agrees within 0.3%, about 70 microns on a quarter. A stage micrometer gets you closer still. “Looks kind of wide” becomes a number you can put in a listing.

It Tells You When It’s Guessing

Tools that measure and tools that infer live on separate tabs, and the inferring ones wear pale yellow so you always know which is which. The experimental tab is where I get to play mad scientist, and you get to play along, knowing exactly what you’re looking at.

Your Photographs Stay Yours

No watermarks, no uploads. Every capture goes into your own folder, filed under its coin, with the settings that took it written down beside it. I’m a photographer. If software stamped a logo on my pictures I’d riot, so this one doesn’t.

Built on One Collection

Photos, notes, grade, provenance, the shelf it sits on and what it’s worth all hang off one coin record. The picture, the paperwork and the price, finally in the same place.