Aristo dimmer for Zone VI lamp?

[Hal Hardy]

I never thought I would see the day that my enlarger lamp would be too bright, b ut my Zone VI cold light is even with both supplemental diffusers under it , for cing me to stop down the lens into diffraction range.

I'm wondering if the Aristo solid state dimmer will work with my lamp. I'm tryin g to avoid ND filters.

I emailed Calumet a week ago with no response so far. Aristo's web site has it a nd it looks promising.

[RichardRitter]

Yes the dimmer will work.You may want to run the Zone VIII developing time test. Cold lights give better results with denser negatives.

[Michael Feldman]

If you can find a used Zone VI Cold Light Stabilizer (discontinued) at a reasonable price, you can use it as a dimmer, even without hooking up the photocell (which normally has to installed separately for Aristo heads). If you turn down the lamp intensity by at least 25% you should get excellent stabilization as well with this unit.

[Hal Hardy]

Thanx. After pricing a filter holder and a couple of ND filters, there was no price difference to speak of and in the case of Kodak filters, the dimmer is actually cheaper (surprise).

[Dave Pettrow]

The D750 Lamp Dimmer can be used with all Aristo Cold Light Enlarging Heads. It's available from B & H Photo ($89.95). At their web site go to PHOTO > ENLARGERS & ACCESSORIES > ACCESSORIES FOR COLD LIGHT HEADS.

[Hal Hardy]

The D750 dimmer has arrived and this is a follow up report.

Not only does it work as advertised, but has an unexpected benefit- the lamp has virtually no warm up period when I start an exposure! That means I can take the compensating tic-toc timer off and replace it with the old mechanical Gralab. One less wire to mess with. I wonder why this isn't mentioned in the product description?

Anybody wanna buy a Zone VI tic-toc timer? :-)