What is the best digital camera to use for pictures of jewellery?

Any should be fine you may want to turn off the flash if you take the picture very close to the jewelery

Any cam really. Somethine 3.0 mega pixels or over should be fine. Light the jewely with a lamp and turn off the flash to reduce glares.

Jewelery is tough to photograph, lighting is the key. Any decent camera should do fine if you can get good lighting and the right angle. 3.0 mega pixels or more would be fine.

as was answered- nearly any camera. however- I'd find one with a good macro mode.

With that in mind- you'll want a small tabletop tripod, good lighting, jewlery stand, and background (such as black or colored felt). For beautiful photos of jewlery, as anything, it's not the camera - but the photographer. there are a lot of tips and tricks for making your jewlery stand out beautifully in photos- and it's more than just snapping pictures of them.

If you are not going to go for a DSLR with a macro lens, almost any point and shoot with a macro mode will serve you well. The thing is, I feel that you need to use the flash to force the aperture to close while still having enough light for an exposure. Many here will tell you different, but follow this advice and see what you think.

Use your macro setting and experiment. Let's say you have a point and shoot camera with macro and a flash on the camera. You might have to go to a manual mode to do this, but...

Put your ring on a nice background surface. I like to just put it in a ring box. Zoom out at least half-way so that you will be working about a foot away from the ring. Be sure that you get focus confirmation. Shoot a picture USING flash. Check the LCD for the result. If you have overexposed the ring, use the EV adjustment to reduce the exposure. For small items, I often find that I need to reduce the exposure by about 1.0 EV. (That's -1.0 EV.) It is better to have the ring properly exposed and the background underexposed, so just worry about the ring for now. Using a deliberate underexposure will cure the "too shiny" appearance of the stones and metal.

If you know how, you can use either full manual exposure or just Aperture Priority and choose a smaller aperture (larger number) to make the ring show up in better focus.

If you have a DSLR, post your question again stating the kind of camera that you have and the lens that you are using and we will give more details.

If you are doing any image processing at all, such with Photoshop or it's cousins, you can crop the image to 800 pixels by 800 pixels and use Supersize images on eBay. I always use the Picture Pack when I am selling anything of any value.

Check out http://www.members.aol.com/swf08302/hear... which I did a while ago using a Nikon Coolpix 5400 exactly as described above. I do NOT think this is acceptable, but we decided not to sell the ring anyhow, so I didn't bother to do a better job. It's still better than some I've seen. I don't keep old photos of sold items around, so I don't have much to show you, but at least you know that it's possible to get an acceptable result even without spending huge dollars on your equipment.

The key things to remember are:
-Macro setting
-Zoom out to get about a foot away from your subject
-Use flash
-Try different EV settings and expect that you will end up with a negative EV setting, such as -1.0 EV.

Here are a couple more auction photos done as described:

800 x 800 http://www.members.aol.com/swf08302/york...
800 x 800 http://www.members.aol.com/swf08302/mont...

The other posters are 100% correct when they say lighting is key. I'd also add that sharpness of the image is important so you will want to use a tripod.

I've attached a link to a website that has simple instructions for building a small light tent. The light tent helps to deal with shadows and to diffuse the light. I built one using the instructions and use it for macro photography. I haven't done jewelry per se but have done military insignia in gold and silver and gotten good results.

Lighting, tripod, nice background, and most any decent digital camera (I use a Nikon D50 but could have gotten good results with one of my point-and-shoots).

I think sony's macro and olympus's super-macro are the best to go.....and yes light placement and background(velvet or glass with black paint on the back. for point-and-shoot cameras of course.