A friend is letting me test drive his enlarger prior to buying it. I am in the process of moving up from MF (645) to large format. One reason for doing this is to make 16 x 20 prints.
The enlarger is a Beseler 45 MCRX. It is old, but appears to be in fairly good shape. The motor control has an outlet titled "switch". There is a short length of power cord with a switch plugged into the outlet. What is this for?
The light source is an Aristo D2 cold light. There is a sticker on the top of the housing with V54 on it. I assumes this means I have the light designed for use with VC papers. Will above the lens VC filters work with this setup? Are there any filter packs that have 1/4 increment filters? I currently use a Beseler 23c III with a B&W VC head. I use 3.25 or 2.75 settings quite often.
The elarger comes with a 150mm f4.5 Rogonar-S Rodenstock lens. With the head cranked up as high as it can go, it doesn't seem like I can get a 16x20 image on the baseboard - the image measures about 15 x 19. I need some head room for cropping, etc... Am I doing something wrong? Do I need a wall mount kit?
Is this setup good? My friend tried to sell it to me a few years ago for about $850. Now I think he will go for about $300-400. He is of the persuasion that the world is going digital and only dinosaurs or fools would consider wet processing.
Switching to all 16 x 20 accessories appears to be very expensive - new easels, print washers, trays etc.. I might just do 11 x 14 prints for a while until I get the hang of 4 x 5.
Bookmarks