The floor-to-ceiling types. Would they give better 35mm quality than my Leitz 1c??
I thought exactly the same thing, until I printed a 16x20 from an 8x10 negative. Yes, contact prints are beautiful, but big prints are a feast ... a big feast.Why would anyone wish to enlarge a giant, aren't they large enough already?
YES! Leica 5 x7 and 11 x 14 view cameras, Leica 11 x 14 enlarger, and Leica lenses all around! Plus Leica films, papers, and chemistry!!To answer your question, I would say yes but only if the people who made your Focamat 1c and your Leica lenses made the big enlarger and lenses also........Regards!
The floor-to-ceiling types. Would they give better 35mm quality than my Leitz 1c??
Awesome! So let's see some prints!Yes, I have 2 Focotar-2s, 2 Schneider-Focotars, and the original Focotar.
Yes, I have 2 Focotar-2s, 2 Schneider-Focotars, and the original Focotar.
I would suggest that any of the more modern professional enlargers that have the capability to align every stage, from light source through negative stage, through lens stage through to the baseboard, as well as the vertical alignment on both the x and y axes, would be a better unit for sure.
The Ic is a pretty old unit, the IIc would be my choice if you were wishing to stay with a Leitz enlarger.
The ability to do massive enlargements is a great help for severe cropping, or inventive darkroom work. Not often used, but nice to have that option.
Probably the best enlargers for massive work that I have used, regardless of the format, are the DeVere, 504, 508, 5108, 108H and 810H.
The 504 is an enlarger capable of effortlessly enlarging anything from 35mm through to 4x5 film. There are two models, a desk model and a free standing model, floor to ceiling job. Essentially they are the same enlarger, one just has a set of legs and drop table that allows massive enlargements.
For the home darkroom, the desk unit is terrific, if you can find a free standing unit, you are in clover. I myself have one of the free standing floor to ceiling 504 units.
I have used the long column Ic model, not too bad an enlarger, then I was put onto the IIc enlarger and thought it was the bees knees by comparison. I then worked for a while in our special B&W darkroom equipped with motorised Beseler 4x5 enlargers and both fitted with the special Ilford multigrade head. These were pretty impressive, but they couldn’t do massive enlargements without some massive fiddling. But the throughput of these enlargers once you knew what you were doing, would make your eyes water. The paper travelled so fast it barely had time to be still on the baseboard. Just kidding, but you really could put some serious stuff through these enlargers, in a seriously short time frame
I then moved on and up to the De Vere enlarger equipped darkrooms where we did colour and some B&W from colour negatives. The De Vere enlargers were a revelation.
Finally I graduated onto the huge Durst 10x10 enlarger with the 2,000W colour head Essentially the Durst was/is the Rolls Royce of enlargers. However to use one of these you sort of need to know how to keep it running and the list of possibilities (if you have the accessories) is mind boggling, along with the price of everything; Durst were never cheap.
It really depends upon just where in the world you are located, and then what is available second hand in that part of the world. If you live in a part of the world where you can source something biggish, then generally you will be better off.
I’m not saying the Leitz Ic, short or long column, is not good, but in my opinion there are many better enlargers that came along well after the Ic was on the market.
The autofocus feature of the Ic and IIc and for that matter, many other professional enlargers, was and is great, but for critical work, the autofocus feature was never used either by myself or anyone else I was working alongside. The autofocus feature was always good, in fact quite good, and, perfectly suited to what we called colour stat work, but when you are after super critical stuff, it never was used to my knowledge.
Colour stat work is where one did direct positive prints from transparency film to line drawings of critical parts of the image for pasting into magazines or advertising brochures. The resulting prints were sent to the paste up people who contoured them with a scalpel, then pasted them into a layout page, which was then often photographed with a gallery camera using four sheets of film through four different filters and line ruling screens in four different angles, for four colour printing. It was not uncommon to produce in excess of 300 colour prints, all different and all colour corrected, in a single shift. Always of course, saving the really difficult or fiddly ones, for the next shift, sometimes.
Sometimes we had multiple sizes from the same transparency. The image was possibly going to be used in a newspaper advertisement, plus a magazine, plus quite often it would be used in a throw away brochure, what is now termed, junk mail. These transparencies were always done on an autofocus enlarger, generally the IIc enlargers which could handle up to 6x7 (maybe 6x9 not sure).
I would suggest that if you are looking at changing enlargers, if possible, get one with a diffused head, it is a world of difference. A colour head is what I have, but a dedicated B&W diffused head is probably the best thing since sliced bread in enlarger land.
To directly answer your question, I do believe more modern equipment, which is basically at give away prices, is far better. The fact that you will more than likely find something that at the very least can do 5x4”, then that is a bonus.
Mick.
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