My 8X10 Enlarger has an Aristo head with a ton of light output - in combination with my 300mm El Nikkor I have to stop down to at least 45 just to get a comfort able long printing time.
I wonder if this would allow me to make enlarged prints on AZO paper?
Have never tried AZO - but heard a lot about it - wonder how it compares speed w ise to f.inst. Brilliant #2 and #3???
It'll work, but Azo's slower. You may want to open up!
Someone recently told me that Azo was 32 times slower than most enlarging paper. From that, figure out how much time you would expect to need for your exposures. If you estimate the times won't be too long, give it a try.
Now for the shameless plug. I suppose you know that Paula and I are Azo dealers (sell nothing else) in our attempt to keep this paper in production. So if you give it a try we hope you'll get your Azo from us. If we stop selling it, it will go out of production in relatively short order. Azo comes in 8x10 and in 20 x 24 Grades 2 and 3. We are the only ones in the world who have Grade 3 8x10 in 100-sheet boxes. That was a discontinued item. It took over three months of discussions with Kodak to convince them to reinstate this item (they were only going to produce 500-sheet boxes of Grade 3 8x10). I knew that if they only produced 500-sheet boxes few would buy it, then they would discontinue that and with only one grade left, Azo would soon disappear. So they agreed to keep 100-sheet boxes in the catalogue, but only as a special order item. That means that we must buy 108 boxes minimum, and at a higher price than Grade 2 100-sheet boxes because it is a "Special Order." Not great, but at least it is in production. Other places that sell Azo (and there are very few) will tell you that 8x10 Grade 3 in 100-sheet boxes is no longer available. They lie. It is available, but they have to be willing to make an almost $8,000 commitment to stock it. We're faced with having to get another 108 box order in a couple of months (yearly minimum purchase required). We've only sold about 30% of the Grade 3 8x10 100-sheet boxes. Do we reorder? If not, it will be discontinued forever (yearly evaluation by Kodak and if there are no sales in a year, that's it). So we'll get it again, but it sure would be nice if those of you out there who use Azo would get it from us. We have to borrow to buy our yearly quota and while we don't mind stockpiling it for our own eventual use (our becoming Azo dealers is not 100% altruistic) there is a limit. (We would stockpile 500-sheet boxes, not 100-sheet boxes.) Full information is on our web site at www.michaelandpaula.com (look under "Azo"). Or give us a call at 610-847-2005. Many thanks for the indulgence of the group for tolerating this "commercial" posting.
I forgot one thing above. Azo is prefect for printing enlarged digital negatives.
Greetings,
I use an Omega DichroII head which has fairly good light output. Using it I've enlarged 4x5 neg's 2x onto AZO, with print times that averaged 4-8 minutes at f8-11.
Regards, Pete
I have done this with several enlargers. For all of them, I had to just pull the lens off the enlarger, which gave very reasonable exposure times, once I figured out what distance to use. Removing the lens seemed to increase light output by several stops, and on the enlargers I have used, it is the difference between being able to make this work and not. Ability to control the distance reproducibly is a BIG plus to using an enlarger for this purpose, as opposed to a lightbulb or whatever!
Good luck,
Nathan
Anyone figured out, could a flashlight be used instead of the conventional enlarger light ? It shouldn't be hard to use a smaller studio flash as a lightsource. 20x24 AZO prints, wow !
If AZO is 32 times slower, that's 5 stops, that puts you at F8.
Why not just use a bare bulb with a reflector? Works for many, many people, worked for Weston... cheap too!
Or hunt out one of those old used variable lightbox/contact printing thingies..
tim
You'd be amazed how small the demand is for pictures of trees... - Fred Astaire to Audrey Hepburn
www.photo-muse.blogspot.com blog
C'mon guys the thread isn't THAT long - the original poster wants to enlarge the negatives.
Mike - I'm very interested in contact printing digital negatives, can you point me to reference sources?
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