I use all brands of film
Even Kodak
We are constantly told by all you experts here
Test for yourself
I do and I make my own decisions
I worked most of my life in test labs
Used miles of Fujifilm Pressure sensitive film
and shot lots of Polaroid evidence
Used huge tanks of liquid N2 and 5K tanks
We were doing actual fresh science
Originally Posted by Michael R
Tin Can
Film is easy to flatten. Same device that works well for road kill. Of course, you'll need to remove the tread marks afterwards.
A couple of hours ago I came back from the outfit that does my C41 processing, with a roll of 120 film all curled up inside a little box. I just hung it from my sink room clothesline, and weighted it on the end with another clothespin. It will be plenty straight tomorrow. But going back through a long forgotten stack of 8x10 chromes and finding a promising image with a bent corner due to being scrunched in a drawer is a different challenge. I'll keep it under a flat weight for the remainder of the year. I'm not color printing at the moment anyway.
From what I can tell from internet search and brochures, the last generation of Durst 10x10 enlargers only had glass carriers. This would be the L1840 and the HF Horizontal series. When I got my L1840, knowing Durst expected me to use glass all the time (a fan blows on the negative carrier during exposure), I converted all my other enlargers to glass/glass.
Well, I don't see any clue that Glenn Evans actually sold any of his jerry-rigged ones, nor does he give a model number for the hypothetical 184 glassless version by Durst itself. But in his description of that, it does resemble an old Durst carrier in my bone pile of horse-traded odds and ends. What is ironic, however, is how the lab where it came from had converted that itself to fully glass, both sides.
It would have been useless to them otherwise, knowing the relatively huge size of Ciba prints they did, and the long intense exposures involved.
Ciba prints!
Extinct
I was wondering how/why some were running hot lamp for hours on a single neg
Not applicable to most these days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilfochrome#History
Tin Can
Those "hot" high powered enlargers were printing Cibas in about 15 or 30 seconds, even with relatively dense contrast masks attached. Not hours. A transparency left in those conditions even two minutes might be faded to worthlessness. My own color mural enlarger had to be cooled with four separate pure silicone hoses. Just the cooling fan used more energy than a typical big industrial table saw. That's why I got rid of the thing and built my own custom 8X10 colorhead to be far more efficient, energy and cooling wise. The downside is that that my own colorhead is rather massive and heavy, and requires a pulley system just to lift off. Now that the Ciba era is over, the name of the game is how to prolong exposures so they won't be too fast using RA4 chromogenic paper instead. But I worked all that out over a decade ago.
Very long exposures were counterproductive. Not only did reciprocity failure start kicking in with Ciba anything more than a minute, or severely after 2 min, but prolonged excessive heating of dichroic filters alters their spectral transmission. I do know someone who built his own colorhead using a rheostatic system much like that well-known AA antique, using a bank of many individual tungsten bulbs, but in this case, composed of a mix of RGB filtered multiple ones. Rheostats of course cut power, and he ended up with exposures of 8 or 9 minutes. Another flaw is that he used ordinary pegboard for his vacuum easel, so if one looked carefully, regular little 1/8 dots of slightly greater density sometimes became visible in his prints.
My own rig is full feedback circuitry pulsed RGB halogen, 8X10 capable, with short printing times. But it is somewhat schizophrenic if any EMI incident occurs. There is no way to fully avoid that unless computerized sine-wave lighting controls are employed, like are now used for very complex stage lighting or rock concert productions. But that option wasn't available yet, and I wouldn't want to have been dependent on rapidly obsolete software or hardware anyway. As a backup option, I have an ordinary Durst L184 fitted with their own 10x10 CMY subtractive head.
Last edited by Drew Wiley; 11-Aug-2021 at 12:11.
Well not to be an ass , but I have to disagree with this Drew. In 1988 era the Dome Stadium was built in Toronto which still hosts the Toronto Blue Jays. Scarborough Colour Labs was the only photo lab allowed to put any signage in the Stadium, around the Stadium and of course all the concourses and walkways leading to the Dome. We are talking a monster job. The first round of work was all backlight Ciba Clear and front lit Ciba pearl prints. I was hired at the beginning of production and for 9 months worked every day on every aspect from taking in work, photo comp, print production and mounting and framing into custom light boxes.
The print material on normal size mural cibas was normal enlarger times, but we also did multiple montage huge images which consisted of 4 ft x 10 ft panels that were then stripped together in the finishing department. My good friend was Jack Seary who in my estimation was one of the worlds greatest photo comp negative technicians at the time. We were using horizontal Durst enlargers and Jack would produce the 8 x 10 dupe composite , and one or two logo colour hits and a white hit negative . We had about 10 mural rooms and two were designed for this huge complicated work. A single Ciba Clear trans could take up to 4 hours to produce which involved a couple of exposures. The room itself was a room within a room where nobody could walk into as the technician would lock in and none of the walls were connected to any corridors for wall shake.
Everyone knew when the two rooms were working and nobody would dare go near them, these rooms were operating double shifts 7 days a week for over a year.
Oh one thing, the darkrooms were all painted black , the technician wore black and glass carriers were mandatory.
It was apparently one of the options to use with the Laraneg carrier system. See here, particularly Gary Mulder's post: https://www.largeformatphotography.i...p/t-70332.html
He probably knows, as he has one. Which I know, because I've seen it in his darkroom. To avoid any confusion: Glenn Evans likely has nothing to do with the glassless Durst holder I've seen on Gary's enlarger.
Bob - I don't understand what you are "disagreeing" about. What you state doesn't conflict with anything I said. Ciba was a dominant color process during at least two decades, and different labs and individuals had all kinds of options in terms of colorheads and so forth, as well as the complexity of jobs they could handle. The whole problem with the big Durst heads as well as the smaller Starlight is that they ran so hot that the dichroic filters got eaten alive, and sometimes had to be replaced nearly every six months at considerable expense. The early Durst mural head also had parabolic dichroic mirrors which were equally expensive to replace or recoat.
Note that I was referring to printing times, which did not involve hours, but at most a minute or two, and was not referring to how much background work potentially went behind it, before the actual printing. I've used up to 13 sheets of 8X10 film myself in terms of pre-masks and so forth just to arrive at a one master printing dupe, though just two was more typical.
There was at least one very huge Ciba operation here too, in terms of actual facility size and the sheer scale of the processing equipment. But every big lab had some kind of mural option. Not all wanted to deal with the plumbing issues, nasty fumes, extra permits, special processors, and sheer facility maintenance expense of high-volume Ciba output. I had none of those issues because I was just doing low-volume personal work in drums, and not any bigger than 30X40 inch prints. But in my day job I did interact on a regular basis with the owners of most of those labs in terms of their facility needs. They became good friends.
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