Can you recommend a Lightbox?

Maybe more suitable for the Darkroom Equipment forum...?? Sorry to ask yet another mundane un-educated question, but APUG is always so very useful!!

I am interested in purchasing a Lightbox to look at my negatives\transparencies\prints. I shoot 35mm and cannot envisage needing anything larger than 10x8 or A4. However, I have no clue what sort to get, which manufacturers are good and bad etc. Can anyone steer me in the right direction of a UK retailer? There's some on e-Bay but I'm not sure which are good one's to buy. There's one on Calumet.co.uk but it's too expensive at around £150.

Have a look at Jessops site. I use a 30 x 45cm which cost around £100 a couple of years ago but they do have smaller ones.

You could make a light box, just make an MDF box paint the inside white, mount some fluorescent tubes in it and get some 6mm 050 opal perspex cut to size for the top.

I use a number of different light boxes at work as we use them for inspecting materials. I really don't find one brand vs another to make much difference. I have a small, inexpensive Testrite (9.5" X 12") in my darkroom and feel that it's a good compromise size. The space that I have for it is small so that I wouldn't like the intrusion of a larger one but it seems adequate for holding the typical array that I'm dealing with. I imagine that if one was laying out publications, etc, a larger size would be more sensible but for my home darkroom duties, I'm quite pleased with it.

As an aside... there is a tube glow to it that takes a minute or so to dissipate. I've not felt that I'm getting paper fogging from it but I have it placed where it isn't likely to have much effect. This could be a factor in the right circumstances.

I'm moving my darkroom into a larger room and am considering building one into one of the work surfaces. I use one in the lab at work that is made this way and it's handy to use it as added table area but still be available for viewing when needed. Also, if you buy a commercial one, you'll notice that they have a movable top mount that allows space to add a layer of glass to protect the top. This is handy as it cleans up nicely and allows a surface for cutting tracings with a razor blade, too.

yellowcat said:

You could make a light box, just make an MDF box paint the inside white, mount some fluorescent tubes in it and get some 6mm 050 opal perspex cut to size for the top.

Click to expand...

This is OK for monochrome negs, but if you are viewing colour slides, you need to buy a commercially available one with colour corrected illumination, the colour temperature of ordinery fluorescent tubes is wrong, especially if you are trying to evaluate the colour balance of your work.
I bought a Jessops 5"x4" Light box recently for about £20 for viewing my 6x6 and 35mm slides, it's colour corrected and I'm very happy with it, they do make them bigger if you need it.

Ben is correct. The CRI, or color rendering index, is important. It needs to be at 90 to 95 percent for critical viewing. In other words, the color spectrum needs to be as full as possible. You can't get that with regular fluorescent bulbs and sheet glass, which contains a lot of green.

One of the standards in the photographic and graphics industry is Graphiclite, and you can pick up very fine used ones on Ebay. I found two small 10"X10 and two 24"X48" models in excellent condition for pennies. They also make a vertical table with a dimming feature for matching your monitor combined with a color correct overhead light for print viewing - both very useful for Photoshop.

I brought my A4 from Nova many years ago. It's fitted with colour corrected tubes and is still expensive. They do a smaller one here: http://www.novadarkroom.com/product/342/Nova_Mini_Lightbox.html

Ted. Jessops have a 4x5 inch lightbox for just under £16. This is battery operated. An AC adaptor can be purchased separately but if money is tight then my experience is that for the length of time the box is on, batteries should last a long time. I find myself only examining one neg at a time so 4x5 should be big enough.

I got a bigger one in a secondhand job lot purchase, complete with an AC adaptor but most of its surface is wasted quite frankly. Yes it is quite fragile and plasticky but there isn't a lot of wear and tear with a lightbox so shouldn't be a problem.

pentaxuser

I thought I updated this thread but clearly I forgot! I bought a Hama LP554 in the end. It's superb, allbeit battery powered and requiring 6 of the C batteries as well! Still, Aldi have a stock and I got all 6 for about £4 I looked at my Velvia transparancies on it and I was blown away by how much better they looked in real life compared to the prints I'd had done. In fact, that kind of hooked me and I've since bought loads more Velvia, although I've not yet had chance to shoot it (too busy firing off Ilford FP4 and Fuji Acros B&W images at the moment!!).

Ted