3D digital representations of an ancient Egyptian artefact were compared for their rendering of surface detail. Normals were generated by three methods: (1) point clouds from the Arius 3D colour scanner; (2) reflectance transform imaging (RTI); (3) photometric stereo. The latter two were constructed from sets of 64 digital images taken under directional lighting in a hemispherical dome. Analysis of the 3D surface normals of corresponding sections of each object indicated that the photometric stereo method produced the best resolution of spatial detail.