anyone tried this yet?
I wonder how light the colour head movement will be without all of that weight?
Not sure where the claims about it being slow with warmtone papers are coming from (unless from generic commentary about LED heads), it makes working with Fomatone quite a lot faster.
Green LEDs are fairly inefficient. The types used here (WS2812 type addressable LEDs) are pretty low-powered to begin with. I've built many LED heads and printed loads with them for several years now, color and B&W. It's been ages since I printed with the 500 head and maybe that was slower, still. If you feel it's fast enough, that's good. Maybe it really is faster than the 500, like I said, it's a long time ago.
Btw, 'fast' is relative; I've come to understand that many people will consider either the toe of the paper curve or a mid (ca. 18%) grey as the reference. I never did this; what is meaningful to me, personally, is the time it takes to produce a print with a full tonal scale. If you print at lower grades, this means you're printing through lots more density. Hence, times will be inherently longer to reach the same shadow density as when printing through the shadow areas on a thin negative with a higher grade. So it depends also a bit on what your frame of reference and your printing preferences are. Crucial considerations are all too often kept implicit when we discuss these things. Mind you, I'm not blaming anyone, merely observing.
The worst case scenario is using a roughly 4x5" light source to print through a small format (35mm or smaller) negative onto warmtone paper (like Fomatone). Since this is something I've frequently done, I've kept this into account in building my own LED heads and thus, they tend to be a little (lots) more beefy than e.g. the Intrepid or Heiland systems, especially in the green channel. But it's a tradeoff between color and B&W; a good color LED head poses a few different requirements than B&W does and the optimization is also different. The Intrepid system works well enough for B&W, but is not very suitable for color work; it's evidenced in e.g. the Naked Photographer review of the system, which highlights the problem (but doesn't succeed in understanding the main cause).
finding a way to get it to deliver individually timed RGB sequential exposures would be a pragmatic way to resolve the issues with the green LED not quite being in the optimal bandwidth for colour and/ or the PWM controller not having a high enough bit-depth
the Heiland device doesn't try to deliver a CMY interface translation, but rather purely RGB on the colour controller.
I suspect the sensor in the Ilford EM-10 has peak sensitivity somewhere outside the peaks of the LED outputs as it seems to give anomalous results with this particular head.
Koraks, thanks for the information regarding added weight.
Lachlan Young, interesting about the short(ish) lead for an enlarger that can have the head around 2 metres from the floor and the baseboard around 150mm from the floor. A footswitch is almost a must with those extreme enlargements; well, it certainly makes life tremendously easier. I just had another look at the link, they show the small desktop enlarger, not the freestanding unit with the drop table.
Presumably there are quite a few of these desktop units in the UK, whereas in Australia they are reasonably rare, as almost everyone purchasing a DeVere enlarger was a professional photo lab and if you were going to spend heaps of money on a commercial tool, then shelling out a bit more money, gave you a heaps more capable enlarger.
es, it would help for the bit depth. If no burning/dodging are intended, it's a viable solution given that the time can be set accurately enough.
no wayI strongly suspect that both the Intrepid and the Heiland use very similar RGB LED panels
exceedingly unlikely in the production version. who knows what anyone does during prototyping.probably being an Arduino or similar
exceedingly unlikely in the production version. who knows what anyone does during prototyping.
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