anyone have experience of a devere 504DS ?

[RobC]

I researched this many years ago but it seems it has a newer and bigger projection array.

Just wondering how good these enlargers are and whether they can make the highest quality 20x16 prints.

DE VERE 504DS Digital Enlarger

 

[Doyle Thomas]

wow never seen these. cant find a price. I guess if you have to ask, u cant afford it!

 

[RobC]

They've been available for quite a few years. When I looked at them some years back the digital projection array which I presume is one from a digital projector, was really quite low resolution for larger images. The current one being 21 Megapixels is better but there are some unknowns such as its format which will affect how wide/tall you can project at 300ppi. Also the old unit moved the array during exposure to blur the pixels into each other so I figured it wouldn't be much good. Don't know if that still happens with the new unit. Hence my question.

Don't know the price but I expect not cheap.

 

[OzJohn]

They've been available for quite a few years. When I looked at them some years back the digital projection array which I presume is one from a digital projector, was really quite low resolution for larger images. The current one being 21 Megapixels is better but there are some unknowns such as its format which will affect how wide/tall you can project at 300ppi. Also the old unit moved the array during exposure to blur the pixels into each other so I figured it wouldn't be much good. Don't know if that still happens with the new unit. Hence my question.

Don't know the price but I expect not cheap.

Not sure if these enlargers are still made but I saw one some years ago at a trade show and they were selling here in Oz for upwards of $30K. Other companies including Durst experimented with the same idea but it never seemed to really take off and was sort of superceded by Light Jets - they too are no longer made. Agfa used the same strategy in an attempt to adapt analog minilabs to digital without a lot of success.

I've been told that it is not possible to make a LCD panel with elements or pixels or whatever you want to call them small enough so that a very high concentration of them can be placed close together on a relatively large panel. The comparison quoted to me was that if an LCD could be made with the pixel density of a camera chip then this idea would be more practical. That said, I've not come across anyone who has actually used a DeVere digital enlarger so they could have done something different - they are an old, well regarded enlarger manufacturer. OzJohn

 

[RobC]

having re-read the information it seems the projection pixel array is 17 megapixels (not 21 as I stated earlier) which is twice the pixel count of the earlier version. That should be high enough to produce a high quality 12x8 inch image. An 18x12 image would be pushing it a bit, especially if the the pixel array is squarer than a 3:2 aspect ratio.

Too many unknows and AUD 30K is a lot of money ( GBP 14K currently ).

 

[Doyle Thomas]

I saw 1 sold on ebay 1K$

 

[RobC]

Price new start at GBP £10,000 and up. Really only for commercial purposes and colleges etc.

 

[RalphLambrecht]

I saw 1 sold on ebay 1K$

You can get an excellent digital camera and printer for that

 

[JoJo]

There is no 17MP LCD and there never was any 17MP LCD available on the market.
Today, prototypes of 8 or 16MP LCDs are made for new HD video projectors (specially for cinemas) and this is the current state of technology.
So no company produced a 17MP LCD 5 or more years ago! Not for 1.000 and not even for 10.000$ per piece.

17 Megatpixel is NOT the native resolution of the LCD.
I bought a used LCD unit of a Muellerson Minilab in Ebay (also specified 17MP in the datasheet of the minilab).
This unit is the same used in the DeVere 504DS enlarger. The controller card for the LCD was produced in Germany by a company called BBS.

After finding out the connections and signals, I managed to run it using a DVI graphics card.
The LCD is a monochrome one and has a native resolution of 1200 x 1600.
This gives 1.920.000 pixel.

Around the plate with the LCD, 3 piezo actuators are placed to move the LCD.
I guess the actuators don't move the LCD during exposing. But they move the LCD to several positions between different exposures.
Unfortunately, I don't have the piezo controller for the unit. But I guess they have to move the LCD to 9 (?) different positions (3 in X and 3 in Y direction) and expose with 9 specially calculated pictures. Because the LCD is monochrome, they need all pictures to be exposed sequentially for colours. So 27 exposures totally for one colour print.
1.920.000 pixel x 9 = 17.280.000 (17 Megapixel)

The light comes from an RGB LED head, called "LED booster".

The main trick is to calculate 9 low resolution images out of a highres picture to "stack" them together to form a highres image again.
The LCD has a fillfactor of more than 75%, so the pixels are overlap when exposing a 3 x 3 position raster.
Before making piezo drivers to test this, I want to write a software to evaluate the calculation and see what happens as a simulation on the PC screen.

Joachim