Sinar P3 with 54H back

Sinar 54H digital back, Sinar P3 camera
This electronic camera was purchased for numismatic photography as a successor to a Sinar 44H which was a successor in turn to a Leica S1. The digital camera back is capable of 5400 x 4080 resolution with a 14-bit color depth in single shot mode. For stationary objects such as coins, piezo-electric steppers in the digital back move the image sensor array allowing the camera to make 16 shots to expose each image half-pixel to each color, R+G+G+B, in order to increase the color depth, eliminate color interpolation, and double the effective image resolution, which results in 10800 x 8160 pixels x 48 bit color. These image files are 680 million bytes each, or over 1 gigabyte per coin. The lighting uses a color-corrected strobe adjustable in one-tenth stop increments. Even though the lighting is from the side, it is effectively made axial with a half-silvered mirror, the mirror adjustable with three degrees of freedom as are the object, lens, and back stages. The camera's computer interface is via firewire and the its shutter and the strobe are software controlled. A paper from the Rochester Institute of Technology describes the use of similar equipment to photograph art with a high degree of color accuracy.

Sinar 54H digital back, Sinar P3 camera

This electronic camera was purchased for numismatic photography as a successor to a Sinar 44H which was a successor in turn to a Leica S1. The digital camera back is capable of 5400 x 4080 resolution with a 14-bit color depth in single shot mode. For stationary objects such as coins, piezo-electric steppers in the digital back move the image sensor array allowing the camera to make 16 shots to expose each image half-pixel to each color, R+G+G+B, in order to increase the color depth, eliminate color interpolation, and double the effective image resolution, which results in 10800 x 8160 pixels x 48 bit color. These image files are 680 million bytes each, or over 1 gigabyte per coin.

The lighting uses a color-corrected strobe adjustable in one-tenth stop increments. Even though the lighting is from the side, it is effectively made axial with a half-silvered mirror, the mirror adjustable with three degrees of freedom as are the object, lens, and back stages. The camera's computer interface is via firewire and the its shutter and the strobe are software controlled.

A paper from the Rochester Institute of Technology describes the use of similar equipment to photograph art with a high degree of color accuracy.