Making Modern Magic Lantern idea thread, LED?

[Tin Can]

I have long wanted to project Large Format slides on walls.

At least 4X5 as it may be the best size. Or 2x3?

I find ALL existing 35mm and 6X6 slide projectors pretty tired and old. Hot, expensive bulbs that blow out all the time. I have bought and rejected many.

I tried OHP and considered BAUSCH AND LOMB, Golde, etc, but they are either very expensive or cheap mantle pieces.

The earliest Magic Lanterns were candle lit, then gas lit and finally carbon arc. Very old tech.

I am thinking at first use a tilt head Beseler and add a powerful LED lamp. I want this to shine brightly!

Assuming a very dark room,

How many lumens?

Color temp?

Yes WA enlarger lenses would be ideal, but they are not easily found at any price.

I have 150mm Rodagon, but maybe a faster lens would be better. Radar 4.5?

Point source with condensers or diffusion.

I know this is similar to mural printing on walls, but I want way brighter positive images.

These are a new category in LED, but not yet available singly.

All ideas welcome.

[LabRat]

Just think what an enlarger would need to project... Use enlarger parts... And use a bright projection screen...

Steve K

[LabRat]

Oh, and try a fast projection lens instead of an enlarger lens... That would be the big difference...

Steve K

[Drew Bedo]

Isen't this basically the concept behind an enlarger?

[Tin Can]

Isen't this basically the concept behind an enlarger?

Yes, but I want it very bright, so I need a powerful 'and not hot' light source.

A cold light head won't do it, and I want the best color temp for both E6 chromes and B&W positives.

I want to project up to 5x7 and 8X10 'slides'.

I do not want a digital transparency, analogue process only.

[Drew Wiley]

How glass plate color separation negs were originally projected was with three aligned carbon arc projectors. Talk about hot and bright! LED is actually rather weak and not particularly versatile if you consider you need to focus the array. Someone showed me the brightest unit I have yet seen two days ago. I told them to be very careful where they aimed it, or I literally wouldn't be able to drive home that evening! But all those lumens were on a wing-shaped array designed to light up a very large space. Seemed about three times brighter than the market equivalents currently available in this country, and with much more reliable components. Expensive, naturally. I think halogen would be the most likely choice. You could invent a water-cooled housing if necessary, with coils, if you plan on auditorium sized slide shows. Otherwise find good projector bulbs like US or Japanese-made ELH, which can run straight 115 voltage in more than one burn position. Your bigger problem is how to keep the film flat. There are still quite a few Gepe 6x7 anti-Newton glass slide mounts laying around here and
there, but I've never personally seen anything bigger.

[Drew Wiley]

... Yes, you could have Focal Point cut you a sandwich of AN glass at around $100 per sheet, but you'd need quite a few pairs of this to actually make a slide show that didn't suffer from long interruptions cooling and remounting them. I once had a big horizontal Durst color mural enlarger that would make a helluva projector.
Of course, the cooling fan alone sucked up more wattage at 220V than the typical industrial table saw motor, and if you left a transparency in the thing more than
a minute it would be 25% faded.

[Tin Can]

I have 10 sheets of 8X10 AN.

I might try offroad racing car LED.

Maybe my slide show will use 4 projectors and switch them on and off.

Or I rent one of those Laser signwriters and call it a day.

This will be a wacky Art installation anyway...

[Drew Wiley]

If this were a decade back when a full selection of chrome films were still available, I'd preserve the original chrome and make 8x10 dupes. Once Cibachrome
ended, I sold off all the remaining boxes of Fuji dupe film in my freezer, so can't help there. Of course, you could go back to the 3-projector method using black
and white separation negatives; but there is a pretty steep learning curve doing matched sets from your original chromes. The advantage is that these wouldn't
fade, and they'd do a superior job reproducing the full scale and hues of your original. But 8x10 T-Max ain't cheap either, though FP4 could be substituted with a
bit more fuss. You'd want to hypothetically learn the technique with 4x5 film anyway, unless you want the piggy bank to have a quick death rather than slow one.

[Tin Can]

If this were a decade back when a full selection of chrome films were still available, I'd preserve the original chrome and make 8x10 dupes. Once Cibachrome
ended, I sold off all the remaining boxes of Fuji dupe film in my freezer, so can't help there. Of course, you could go back to the 3-projector method using black
and white separation negatives; but there is a pretty steep learning curve doing matched sets from your original chromes. The advantage is that these wouldn't
fade, and they'd do a superior job reproducing the full scale and hues of your original. But 8x10 T-Max ain't cheap either, though FP4 could be substituted with a
bit more fuss. You'd want to hypothetically learn the technique with 4x5 film anyway, unless you want the piggy bank to have a quick death rather than slow one.

First reverse 4x5 X-Ray and learn with FP4 , then we get crazy.

Art is never cheap.