DIY 31 Megapixel Enlarger

[travelight]

I just bought a 7” 10k screen to put in my 5x7 durst. I’m working on some software to control it and doing the coding on my MacBook Pro. I won’t use the Mac in the darkroom, but would like to use the new screen for testing/debugging my work.
Has anyone managed to create custom resolutions for one of these screens on a Mac? Mine is showing it as a virtual screen when I attach it, which appears to prevent the Mac from applying any custom resolutions even if I could make one.

 

[Ethan Brossard]

I just bought a 7” 10k screen to put in my 5x7 durst. I’m working on some software to control it and doing the coding on my MacBook Pro. I won’t use the Mac in the darkroom, but would like to use the new screen for testing/debugging my work.
Has anyone managed to create custom resolutions for one of these screens on a Mac? Mine is showing it as a virtual screen when I attach it, which appears to prevent the Mac from applying any custom resolutions even if I could make one.

I have not found any way to run these screens on mac or windows well. I'd suggest getting a cheap raspberry pi to run the screen using Linux (it's what they were designed for).

 

[Ethan Brossard]

I was thinking of picking up a 16k display and the Raspberry Pi 5 and dive into this rabbit hole myself
I was wondering if you would mind sharing some info about what OS image/config you used to get the display running on the Pi @Ethan Brossard ?

I am running the Pi 5 with the standard Raspberry Pi OS. There is one config file I had to modify to get the display to run on it, I believe it is /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt I can't remember the exact code I added to it, and the pi is in the darkroom at work currently, but I'll try to remember to get it soon.

There are a few things to keep in mind about the 16k display:
- It only has a bit depth of 3, so can only display 8 tones of gray. This leads to an extremely posterized image if you want to use it straight out of the box.
- The way it reads data, to get a group of 8 grayscale pixels, you have to encode them properly into a single 24-bit RGB pixel
- The pixels aren't square, so you need to give it a "stretched" image in order for the image to render properly
- As best as I can tell, the display functions sort of like two 8k displays next to each other, and where they meet in the middle you can get some weird overlapping / glitching if you don't modify the image you send the display properly

I'm working on software to get around all those issues, and it works, but at the moment its very much not user friendly and likely wouldn't be usable by anyone but me. Hopefully in the next couple months I'll have a user friendly version ready.

Once it's ready, I'm planning to go into production with it on a very small scale. I've already had a few people reach out to me about purchasing it. My initial plan was to build a negative carrier unit which could be installed in existing 8x10 enlargers, but Beseler has a patent from several years ago for a digital enlarger negative carrier that fits into existing enlargers. I'm not fluent enough in legalese to know if it would prevent me from selling a digital negative carrier, but there's a chance I'd have to sell it as a whole enlarger rather than just a negative carrier.

 

[michaelbirkmose]

Received my 6.8" 9K display a few days ago and put together a PWM driver in Python (might build a lower-level solution later). I’m running it strictly in 1-bit mode. Initial results look promising.

For a quick low-tech test I used a laptop screen as the light source and contact-printed through the LCD. The prints came out surprisingly blurry — probably because the crystals sit inside the LCD casing, and I also didn’t use a sheet of glass on top to ensure proper contact. Even so, the basic proof of concept seems solid.

I coded it so exposure is controlled via a LUT: not by changing the input image, but by assigning exposure slots per grayscale value and modulating them through timing.

I’ve signed up at a community darkroom and plan to give it a more “real” test in a week or two. For now I’m running with the protective peel still on the LCD, just to avoid too much handling. For those who’ve worked with these displays: how fragile are they in practice? Do they scratch easily, or are they manageable with reasonable care? Is it possible to safely clean them with alcohol or similar solvents once the protective film is off?

All in all, this feels like a really fun project. Thanks to @avandesande for sharing the original idea!