Picture is not sufficient to show important details. Options to help me/others help you:
A. Get a better picture or pictures by one or more of the following:
1) Using a higher resolution camera.
2) Using more lighting. More lighting entering lens = better image quality.
3) Using better-aimed lighting. Current lighting is not evenly dispersed. Ideally high spots and low spots in the hallmark should be two different colors -- high bright, low dark. In this picture it is mixed, some high spots are light, some are dark, and some low spots are light while others are dark. The effect is that sharpening the image with software produces misleading results.
4) Placing a magnifying glass over the lens of the camera when you take the picture. I do this for almost all pictures I post where detail is important.
5) Taking more pictures from multiple angles. Upwards, downwards, diagonally, etc. Images can be cross-referenced against one another so we can be sure we are seeing something not nothing.
6) The picture file you posted is only 29kb and is a .jpg. If you are cropping this image before uploading, make sure you are not saving as a .jpg. Every time you save a .jpg, the pixel information is compressed and you lose more detail. If your camera takes jpg images it is already compressed once. If you crop it and save as a .jpg, you have compressed it again and by this point may have lost about 20% of the raw data (*ballpark figure). Save it as a lossless format, e.g., .png or .tiff.
B. Take pictures of the ring itself so that even if we can't find the hallmark, maybe we can zero in on something distinctive about the ring itself, allowing us to find another copy of the ring, and thus ID the hallmark as well.
C. At minimum, tell us what you think you see in person. What I see looks a lot like an "X" at the beginning, and anyone's guess after that. "XI" with a superscript "4"? "XP" followed by an apostrophe? It's impossible to tell from here.
Just some thoughts. Would love to help but tried enhancing the image and got nothing I trusted.
-mcl
