Cold Light Contact Printer?

[Pawlowski6132]

Has anyone ever used one of THESE (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&_trksid=p4340.l2557&rt=nc&nma=true&item=220755756179&si=7MDRqpRgLgPTTA8falpv%252F5HQmTE%253D&viewitem=&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWNX%3AIT)? Seems like a contact print machine based on a Aristo cold light. I got it on the cheap so, what the heck. It prolly doesn't even work.

I'd be curious to learn more about it while it's makes its way here. Five minutes on the Google proved futile for me.

Joe

[Ken Lee]

Nothing wrong with using a lamp that has a long life with a stable and appropriate spectrum for photo paper.

Standard light bulbs, I presume, do not meet those criteria - although people use them.

A cold light lamp, given proper warm-up, should do better.

If you have an enlarger, you can use that light. It's predictable, controllable, and it matches the light you use to make enlargements.

[ic-racer]

Diffuse light can minimize the effects of dust on the glass, but you need to make sure you have enough pressure on the film/paper combo. Just the slightest separation will cause the image to be unsharp.

[nolindan]

An incandescent lamp has a very stable and long life with a minimal turn-on time, making it an ideal light source for amateur photographic use. When used with stabilized power supplies they are are used as calibrated laboratory light sources.

Precision contact printing is done using a point-source. Dust and glass cleanliness are a continual problem.

A cold light contact printer is going to be a bit problematic - you are going to have to let it warm up, then shut it off and quickly load the paper and negative, then turn it back on for the exposure. OTOH, as Mr. Racer pointed out, a diffuse source will mitigate dust.

In a production environment, where prints are being made one right after the other, the cold light in this printer would stay at operating temperature and warm up would not be an issue.

Cold lights for photographic use were originally a budget alternative to condenser heads. However, in this application a cold light would have cost more than an incandescent lamp and some opal glass. Possible reasons might be shorter printing times or someone had a cold light head left over after upgrading an enlarger.

Printers of this type were used to make drugstore prints - in the days when drugstores had darkrooms in the back, enlargements cost extra and people used 616 film because it gave nice large contact prints. The printers were designed for fast work with pressure backs with spring-loaded push down handles that turned on the lamp when the negative and paper were clamped.

Printers for studio work had arrays of lamps with individual switches for each lamp. This allowed for easy and repeatable dodging and burning - though not with any great precision, mind you.

[Brian Ellis]

Some types of light may be more convenient than others (e.g. the bluer the light the shorter the exposure time if you're using graded paper) but none will have any effect on the looks of the print. Of much greater concern than the type of light source IMHO is making sure that the paper is illuminated evenly from corner to corner, which you can check with a spot meter, and that the paper and negative are in good contact as Mr. Racer said. You can generally be sure of that by using a contract printing frame with at least two sets of good strong clamps on the back.