I have a Zone VI Cold Light head and the stabilizer that I was given several years ago with a 4x5 enlarger. I have never used it just powered it up with the instructions to make sure it worked and it does. I was wondering are these desirable at all and do they have any value?
Last edited by Kyle M.; 4-Jun-2023 at 01:33.
Yes they have value- they are an effective way to have a diffusion light source on your enlarger. I've been using mine for over 30 years.
A bit of background- the head was actually made by Aristo. Fluorescent lamps of that type have an unfortunate characteristic- their brightness varies with temperature, and they do get warm, and the brightness can fluctuate from minute to minute. This makes enlarging with them frustrating, to say the least.
The stabilizer's photocell reads the light output and varies the voltage to maintain a constant brightness, removing this issue. IIRC they were available to fit Beseler or Omega enlargers.
So we don't do valuations on this site- but you have a useful piece of gear there.
I agree with Mark Sampson it is the best light source I have found for Omega DII / D2. It's very useful.
There are 2 electric cords one to the timer, the other runs a built in heater, be sure to unplug the heater when not in use.
Zone VI also sold a Compensating beeper which reads the actual amount of light output and adjusts the interval of beeps to give precise repeat exposures, just a long as the cold cathode tube is warmed up a bit first. This is essentially a simple kind of "light integrator" involving a probe into the illumination box. It eliminates the need for trying to stabilize the light output itself. I have used on for a long time with complete consistency on a much more powerful Aristo high-output 12X12 cold light. But a number of other similar devices have been marketed over the decades; and those who do UV printing are also quite familiar with these kinds of monitoring devices.
Well since I was so close to having my darkroom finished anyway I decided to keep it. I made my first ever prints two nights ago. When I was given the enlarger I was also given a 250 sheet box of Ilford 8x10 fiber base paper, along with several other boxes of Ilford 8x10 paper including a box warm tone all fiber base. I’m not sure if it is VC or Multigrade I’d have to go look but I’m very happy with the prints I have made so far. That fiber base paper sure does curl when it dries. I have some 5x7 RC variable contrast paper on the way.
Congratulations, Kyle! Welcome to your new addiction!Originally Posted by Kyle M.
Re: Print Curl, I found a use for my long outdated encyclopædia set - 8x10 fits nicely and suddenly I have book towers growing in my living room.
It makes for a nice surprise when you revisit a tome a year or three later and discover overlooked prints interleaved amongst your research.
Enjoy your new darkroom and the whole printing experience; it's the best part of the whole process for me.
If the head puts out white-sh light, then it is one of the originals. It will not work well with modern variable contrast paper and you can try the recommended filtration to fix that but I sure could never get it to work doing that. Contrast was always way too high no matter what I did. The later ones (and replacement tubes) were a very different hue and work great with modern VC filtration. If the light looks aquamarine blue you lucked out and got one of those. But the original will still work fine with graded papers, not that there are lots of choices there these days.
Hmm. I've been using my original (blue light) Zone VI head since 1989. Contrast has always been controllable... I use under-lens filters and have managed to make it work. Some VC filtration "answers" were not what i'd have expected, but you can't see that in the prints.
A while back I tried putting a CP40Y above the negative to "correct" the filtration, but after some time I decided it was unnecessary. I've had very few negatives that I could not print. And had I been totally convinced of the importance of those few, I could have worked harder and gotten good results.
I will say that in the early 2000s Oriental offered a VC paper (now gone) whose contrast grades were totally wacko- but I used it up eventually. Never figured that one out; but it didn't look like the long-gone-and-lamented Oriental Seagull G anyway.
I do believe that Aristo does/did offer a fluorescent tube more suitable for VC papers; I thought it too expensive for the value it would add.
So my short answer would be "don't sell this light source short". YRMV of course; I think the optimum light source for modern VC papers would be a dichroic color head. I printed on those for many, many years on the job, but I don't need one to get good results at home.
Correct. It's called a V54. Zone VI Studios and/or Aristo may have offered this tube as an option to the original blue tube in their enlarger-specific heads, and most certainly offered it in a VC unit that used filters for the Beseler 45 series (I have one.)
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