I spent years printing RA4 with Philips RGB enlargers. I also had DeVeres with regular color heads available, but I preferred the Philips.
I spent years printing RA4 with Philips RGB enlargers. I also had DeVeres with regular color heads available, but I preferred the Philips.
“You often feel tired, not because you've done too much, but because you've done too little of what sparks a light in you.”
― Alexander Den Heijer, Nothing You Don't Already Know
A long time ago (2004) this happened:
https://www.photo.net/discuss/thread...t-bulb.148308/
It worked out great.
I don’t find any trace of the maker on the web now. He had also made some led sources for 4x5 enlargers.
Philip,Originally Posted by Ulophot
Thank you. I’m not good at the building things either, which is why the Intrepid enlarging kit might be the ticket. Not sure which enlarger you have, but it looks to me as if the Intrepid LED light source part of the kit could be easily adapted for use on an Omega D2. If the dimensions are right, it could simply be placed on top of the negative carrier with perhaps a bit of work to cover light leaks around the edges. This is a VC compatible LED head with a dedicated timer. And I think, if memory serves, it’s less than $200. I’ve not seen one of these kits in person, so maybe there are aspects of it that would negate my idea. If I had money to burn, I’d buy one to see if it would work. If nothing else, I could always use it to turn my 4x5 camera into an enlarger, which is what it’s designed for. I should mention that I have no connection to the Intrepid Camera Co.
Ben, I have D2, Zone VI round (Aristo) non-VC source (with sensor, plugged into a Zone VI compensating enlarging timer) in the aluminum D2 collar.
Henry, it's interesting to see that a few folks were experimenting already 15 years ago, with a metal enclosure and a few very bright LEDs. As for the parts shown, I'll tell you how far my expertise extends: there are wires, and things on circuit boards.
My hope is, that by raising this subject and eliciting discussion of it, it may directly or indirectly prompt some further work, updated with today's possibilities. As previously indicated, I take the manufacturing experience of those like Drew seriously and recognize that I am out of my league. Commercial production-scale manufacturing is serious business. However, there are many good products for relatively small markets made by small businesses of quality, run by inventors or partnerships that know how to make a good product, how to interface and contract with suppliers/manufacturers where needed, etc. Although I don't know the story behind Stearman Press, many of us have benefited much from their SP-445 and -810 products. On the other hand, the attempt to recreate Polaroid 55, which may be ongoing, indicates the obstacles faced by small-scale attempts at replicating extremely complicated, high-precision processes mastered by huge companies with the wherewithal to invest millions before market release.
With the recent years' rebound in interest in film photography, some portion of which will remain after the fad-ists drop away (NOT the subject here, so let's put that in a Lounge thread, please), it seems to me a good time to look ahead, with the demise of cold light heads on the horizon, to stir up some new LED replacements without all the bells and whistles of something like the Heiland. I hope something good will emerge.
Philip Ulanowsky
Sine scientia ars nihil est. (Without science/knowledge, art is nothing.)
www.imagesinsilver.art
https://www.flickr.com/photos/156933346@N07/
It was not just an experiment. It worked and still works. I have it still.
So far, I haven't seen a speck of comparative visual proof one way or another of how well the Heliand works for color, even for small prints, let alone as a hypothetical replacement for time proven halogen colorheads, which is different from just replacing cold lights. And speaking hypothetically, why would a color printer use something like this and spend that much money unless it offered some kind of actual improvement in color quality? Just getting any kind of color wouldn't cut it. But it will be interesting to see what happens, one way or another. I hope it's true. Someone like me would would need to see an actual optimized test chart in person with my own eyes, scientifically done by an expert printer, and not just some casual web example. At my age, I doubt I'm going to build another 8x10 specialized colorhead for big prints, which the Heiland doesn't even address anyway. Otherwise, I kinda view this like how color laser printers got their traction. At first, they were largely a disappointment. It took awhile to get their application and improved paper performance to merge, and they're still obscenely expensive to both purchase and maintain. LED enlarger heads certainly aren't going to need that kind of money, but due to diminished darkroom demand in general, neither are they going to attract much manufacturer interest at all. But there are a lot of innovative individuals out there, and something good will inevitably come out of all this effort.
Well you can call me an experienced color printer, probably not an expert. I will be making some RA4 prints soon with my Heiland head. I will report back my findings. I know the Heiland RGB source works probably like the LEDs in my Fuji Frontier scanners, except that the Fuji does each color in separate exposures, where as the Heiland is mixing the RGB values into one illumination.
I see the advantage as being essentially future proof if it works. No bulbs to replace ever, and consistent output. For my LPL, this also means no module changing (if you wanted to use both a VCCE and dichro unit, probably rare for most users).
Someday I'd like to step up to a Kienzle 8x10 enlarger. They sell a baseboard model with a Heiland LED for around $7k new, which is actually a decent deal. In theory, this will have the exact same calibrations and response as my LPL.
Wonderful! But it will still be a little difficult to ascertain just how much realistic punch something like this has, requisite to bigger prints, especially since Heiland is indeed capable of custom making just about any size someone needs. Eager to hear your results.
Is there anyone out there printing RA4 with a Heiland unit? I am curious.
I can't find a trace. Mr Heiland, on his video, seemed rather out of date on what color printing involves; so I wonder to what degree they have even tested it for actual color applications. I did run into one possible clue. In Ilford's endorsement, they stated that it would not achieve as hard a grade as their own VC unit, which now uses blue vs green filtered halogen light. That means the blue output of the Heiland might not be as pure or as narrow band. One would ideally want even greater purity for color printing in comparison to more forgiving VC applications. I also suspect the case is similar with red and green output. But this is just an informed hunch. Somebody really does need to give these devices a serious scientific color printing test. Just getting OK results is not a step forward. I remain guardedly skeptical, but I hope that I'm proven wrong. With halogen, the nm bandwidth of the respective RGB additive lights can be very precisely trimmed off either side with dichroic "sandwich" filtration, much more accurately than is possible with CMY subtractive filtration where a certain amount of white light inevitably sneaks through each filter. And there's no way to do that with lots of tiny little LED's. Nor does there seem to be any blackbody LED equivalent having a true continuous spectrum that can act like an uninterrupted white light source for optimized CMY filtration; but it's probably somewhere on the R&D horizon. If I thought my color printing had more than a decade or so left, and I was still in the market for yet another colorhead, I'd want to see very specific official spectrograms of all the Heiland component LED's, as well as net lumen information.
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