Quote Originally Posted by chuck461 View Post
I had a 5x7 Besseler enlarger in my darkroom for a while to decide if I wanted to buy it. The color of the cold light was not suitable for variable contrast paper. I'm sure someone here can explain the reason better than I can. I passed on it because of that.

Chuck
I read an article about this many years ago. It was probably in DARKROOM TECHNIQUES. They compared different cold light heads with various VC papers, and not surprisingly, they got different results with each combination. In some cases the problem was significant, but in other cases it was not. I think it had to do with the combination of "color" from the cold light head, the color of the VC filter, and the spectral responsiveness of the paper. Some VC filters had little change in effect, while others worked closer to what you would expect. I, of course, can't remember what was bad and what was best, but this confirms your suspition that it CAN be a problem. Since I use VC papers, I decided to stick with my diffusion color head for most things, but frequently use my normal condenser head and sometimes my point-light source head.