I received my V54 today! The sure did pack it well - it came in quite the oversized box with tons of padding. In any case, I installed it and it's working great! I managed to make a decent print using a #2 filter - looked just about right for what I would expect. I gotta say though it is BRIGHT. I had to stop down to f/32 and it was still a 5 second exposure. To work around that, I now have a stack of 3 Hitech ND filters to drop it down six stops. That gets me to 10 seconds at 5.6 - a little much so I may remove the top filter, but I wanted to make sure I had room to dodge burn in all formats (my 35mm enlarging lens only goes down to f16 as I recall).
Test strips worked out pretty well more or less - exposure was so short more testing is required but I did get proper bands and they seemed to be a stop apart. I just turned the metronome on and kept the light on, exposing each strip after 3 seconds. Easy peasy.
Guess I'll need to get some decent NDs though. Sharpness seemed good through the Hitechs but stacking filters like that makes me concerns I might be causing shenaigans. I guess I'll need to pick up a few NDs to use for the cause. Nice to have more light than not enough I suppose.
It's so bright it does point out ALL the places the enlarger leaks light though. I had to put gaffer tape on parts of it to help mute the light. Doesn't seem to be fogging the paper but I didn't do any long exposure tests yet.
Overall I'm pretty satisfied but glad I had some NDs lying around for sure.
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