durst 138

Luis-F-S · Feb 10, 2021

DREW WILEY said:
No, Luis, you've got it all wrong. The light source choice did not define 138 versus whatever, but the chassis style itself. The hybrid 138G chassis, with 184 dual lower column and 138 upper single column had nothing to do with point light sources or specialty micro work, but could be potentially used for any application where greater stability was needed. The one I could have does it for sake of a big colorhead, oversized baseboard, and greater cumulative height for sake of larger prints.. But just firm wall mounting will completely stabilize an all-single-column 138 at lesser height. Bellows style and lens mount (turret vs single-hole) were minor option differences which evolved over the decades of these things being produced. It's often hard to tell when a particular combination of features was sold that way from the factory, or jerry-rigged out of separate components by the user afterwards. All kinds of combinations were possible.

What you linked per the now defunct Durst USA options included a lot of things that Jens himself cobbled together, or at least claimed he was capable of doing; and this was not entirely a direct reflection of original factory offerings. Jens bought up all kinds of leftovers, not only from Durst, but even from individuals like me (I should know - he never did pay me !). Eventually, he had over twenty usable enlarger in stock, whether new crated units from Durst itself, still unsold by them after a couple decades, or numerous cobbled tweaks by himself for various applications (some equipped with UV printing heads). When he couldn't come up with enough components, heads, or carriers, he was a highly competent machinist and made his own replacements, and also bought out the parts and rights to the Condit corporation.

But anyone who ordered and prepaid for such components by themselves for self-installation risked getting stiffed. He claimed to have all kinds of things in stock that couldn't even be obtained any longer, and that he couldn't make. So toward the end, he did manage to sell all his complete enlargers. But what he was really after was the more lucrative mandatory service contracts with installation and travel expenses that he'd charge labs all over the world. I visited his actual facility when he was still in operation, spent nearly an entire day discussing Durst details and combing through his parts inventory. He certainly knew his products; too bad his business ethics were so flawed.

If you check out the Durst Museum site (I can't recall the specific link) there are some interesting huge dinosaurs in there, which don't show up on Jen's brochure.

Baloney Drew! If you would bother to read what others write before running off at the keyboard, I pretty clearly said that there was the L-139G which was a single post upper with the L-183 base with the 5x7 camera. The G 139 was typically supplied with the point light source. With regards to my photo, I said that mine is an SM-183 with the 138S camera, so I'm not that familiar with differences with the chassis. IC posted a photo of the SM-183 above which is the same enlarger as the one in my photo except that mine has a CLS-301 head and the arm down, whereas the one IC posted has a condenser head with the arm up. You can't even get the name of the enlarger correctly, "The hybrid 138G chassis, with 184 dual lower column and 138 upper single column had nothing to do with point light sources..." There is no 138G chassis, if there is, please post a photo of one or the manual-but you never do, do you! The SM-183 was indeed designed for microfilm work, plus the Nega MC carrier that was supplied with it was to accept aperture cards without removing it from the enlarger. So you said that I referenced the Durst Pro USA which is now defunct, it may come to you as a surprise, but the enlarger division of Durst is defunct also!

"If you check out the Durst Museum site (I can't recall the specific link)", you never can recall, can you? Only innuendos.

ic-racer · Feb 10, 2021

My USA price list from 1987 has some prices that may be of interest:

138S with 100w color head = $11,950 USD
210mm Rodagon = $657 USD

Most expensive on the list L2000 Motorized Vertical = $55,700. This was higher than the HL2501 AF Horizontal ($49,000 USD).

ic-racer · Feb 10, 2021

My enlarger (L1840 + CLS2000) was shown at $22,500 and $1,550 for the Rodagon 300mm on the 1987 list.
On my sales receipt of 1988, the actual prices were $26,500 and $1,825.
Or $58,596.14 and $4,035.39 in today's dollars.

ic-racer · Feb 10, 2021

From my image archive, another SM-183 with a 5x7 CLS color head (300 or 301). :

DREW WILEY · Feb 10, 2021

There were far more expensive horizontal models up to 8x10 carrier size (full metal cabinet stye, not just VH swing feature). Then there was a rare early 11X14 VH monster, perhaps one of a kind, and a 12X16 unit which accepted a pulsed xenon head option, probably the most expensive of all the vertical ones; but it was marketed to print shops, not photo labs. There was one of these in SF a long time back. No single brochure or website shows all of these (Luis - you're welcome to use Google yourself).

The most interesting and very last product the Commercial division made before they shut down was a feedback controlled true RGB additive 8x10 head they intended as the replacement to their big CMY subtractive heads. Six heads went to the NSA, though I have no idea of who made the enlarger chassis involved since everything was customized for large rolls of aerial surveillance film on a registered sequential basis. But I have personally seen all the colorhead replacement guts per se, since these were made in greater quantity. Those colorheads ran so darn hot that the filters had to be replaced every six months. That's exactly why I went back to the drawing board and designed my own one-of-a-kind 8x10 additive RGB head that runs way cooler; but the feedback circuitry can be temperamental sometimes.

Luis-F-S · Feb 10, 2021

ic-racer said:
My enlarger (L1840 + CLS2000) was shown at $22,500 and $1,550 for the Rodagon 300mm on the 1987 list.
On my sales receipt of 1988, the actual prices were $26,500 and $1,825.
Or $58,596.14 and $4,035.39 in today's dollars.
View attachment 266207

IC, only problem with this enlarger is the bulb and reflectors. Not that it's not a fine enlarger, it is, it's just that the bulb is impo$$ible to find. Why I use the DeVere5108. Have a lifetime supply of both ENH and ELH bulbs which compared to the Durst are dirt cheap.! My Durst SM-183 uses a variety of bulbs from the Durst Atlas (250 to 500W) to the G-140 bulbs at 150W. I also have a variety of bulbs for this enlarger to last me a lifetime (or what's left of it).

DREW WILEY · Feb 10, 2021

The Durst CLS300 colorhead uses ordinary ELH bulbs; and its illumination with the 10X10 mixing box is extremely even. The last generation of it gave very clean colors. But the old 2000W CLS 301 was a miserably hot and expensive to maintain thing that ruined those special reflectors periodically. The tube bulbs were expensive from Durst, but not horrible from specialty bulb suppliers who carried realistic substitute options. Unless one is doing huge murals, I don't know why a 2000W head would even be desirable, now that Ciba / Ilfochrome are gone. My old Durst 2000W head would punch a 30X40 Ciba from a heavily-masked original chrome in about 15 sec. With RA4, you'd have to introduce about six stops of neutral density! Total overkill; and the darn cooling fan with it four real silicone hoses used more electricity than an industrial table saw. No need for a heater in that room in winter.

And if you bothered to really read my own posts, Luis, it would be perfectly apparent that I've been aware of the demise of Durst's commercial division for as far back as that transpired. But crated brand new popular 138 and 184 models took another 20 yrs for them to sell off; and perhaps a few still exist brand new somewhere. Why would someone pay full price plus horrific international shipping charges when there are plenty of used ones to be found at a bargain, or sometimes even for free?

ic-racer · Feb 11, 2021

DREW WILEY said:
There were far more expensive horizontal models up to 8x10 carrier size (full metal cabinet stye, not just VH swing feature). Then there was a rare early 11X14 VH monster, perhaps one of a kind, and a 12X16 unit which accepted a pulsed xenon head option, probably the most expensive of all the vertical ones; but it was marketed to print shops, not photo labs. There was one of these in SF a long time back. No single brochure or website shows all of these (Luis - you're welcome to use Google yourself).

The most interesting and very last product the Commercial division made before they shut down was a feedback controlled true RGB additive 8x10 head they intended as the replacement to their big CMY subtractive heads. Six heads went to the NSA, though I have no idea of who made the enlarger chassis involved since everything was customized for large rolls of aerial surveillance film on a registered sequential basis. But I have personally seen all the colorhead replacement guts per se, since these were made in greater quantity. Those colorheads ran so darn hot that the filters had to be replaced every six months. That's exactly why I went back to the drawing board and designed my own one-of-a-kind 8x10 additive RGB head that runs way cooler; but the feedback circuitry can be temperamental sometimes.

These sound fascinating. Are they from mid 1990s? My enlarger came with a whole folder of information but all from mid 1970s throgh mid 1980s. So, before that time period or after that, I don't have much information.

ic-racer · Feb 11, 2021

Luis-F-S said:
IC, only problem with this enlarger is the bulb and reflectors. Not that it's not a fine enlarger, it is, it's just that the bulb is impo$$ible to find. Why I use the DeVere5108. Have a lifetime supply of both ENH and ELH bulbs which compared to the Durst are dirt cheap.! My Durst SM-183 uses a variety of bulbs from the Durst Atlas (250 to 500W) to the G-140 bulbs at 150W. I also have a variety of bulbs for this enlarger to last me a lifetime (or what's left of it).

I found another source of more since this picture. Essentially a lifetime supply too.

ic-racer · Feb 11, 2021

Actually one thing I worry about is the shutter. Even though my base exposures are short (18 to 25 seconds) I may have ten burns. So with all the test prints and burns, the shutter really gets a workout every printing session. Supposedly good for a million exposures, but when I got the enlarger the shutter was already broken and I had to fix it. It has been working fine for ten years so far.

DREW WILEY · Feb 12, 2021

I don't know when the fancy horizontal units were last made; but I suspect production was all over with by the 90's. The peak of European actual machining was in the 70's and 80's. After that, labor got too expensive, and you're entering an era when anodized aluminum components took over, as in their consumer division 4x5 enlarger. However, they no doubt made a few extras during the production run, and some of these might have been kept in storage somewhere and sold later. Their 11X14 VH monster was very early; from the picture it looked like a prototype 184 chassis on steroids.

And I don't know if they even made the pulsed xenon heads for their special plate-burning vertical enlargers, or bought them from another Italian company making an even fancier chassis at that time. These kinds of companies often become subcontractors to one another, so who knows? I'd have to dig through a lot of old boxes to see if kept any of the literature or not. These wouldn't have been good for any ordinary kind of printing anyway, so tis was just curiosity research on my part.

One could also hypothetically use an electronically-controlled shutter for the enlarging lens itself if it became necessary to trim off the start-up and fad-off color shift factor with very short exposures.

AgX · Feb 12, 2021

DREW WILEY said:
I don't know when the fancy horizontal units were last made; but I suspect production was all over with by the 90's.

The last one was released in 2019.
Custom-built for a russian photographer by Heiland: 450kg and format of 20x24 inch.

DREW WILEY · Feb 12, 2021

What does Heiland have to do with Durst? Any seriously-equipped machine shop could hypothetically build their own if there was still a market. I built my horizontal trolley cabinet-shop style using hardwood plywood (it was tossed out when I went vertical), and my big colorhead housing out of machined thick phenolic sheets - heavy stuff.

AgX · Feb 12, 2021

You did not specify Durst, but had it instead about technology in Europe.

ic-racer · Feb 12, 2021

I was able to get to a year 2000 www.Durst.it page in Wayback Machine Archive.
They had 3 categories, Consumer, Pro and Pro-Lambda. Of course, only a few years after that all the darkroom stuff was gone from their web pages.

In the "Pro" section they had these enlargers listed:
AC800
Laborator 1200
Pictochrom Plus
Laborator 1840N
HL 2506 AF

In the "Consumer" section they had these enlargers listed:
M370 BW
M670 VC/Color/BW
Modular 70
M805 BW/Color

Lachlan Young · Feb 12, 2021

ic-racer said:
I was able to get to a year 2000 www.Durst.it page in Wayback Machine Archive.
They had 3 categories, Consumer, Pro and Pro-Lambda. Of course, only a few years after that all the darkroom stuff was gone from their web pages.

In the "Pro" section they had these enlargers listed:
AC800
Laborator 1200
Pictochrom Plus
Laborator 1840N
HL 2506 AF

In the "Consumer" section they had these enlargers listed:
M370 BW
M670 VC/Color/BW
Modular 70
M805 BW/Color

Here's a copy of the last Durst darkroom catalogue - see if you can spot the badge engineered Ahel, LPL etc accessory products... And here's a list of production & support start/ stop dates. Somewhere in the late 90's seems to have been when much of the bigger than 4x5 machinery went EOL - though there's the question of how long they were getting rid of NOS after that date - and how long the machines being sold in 1998 had been sitting on the shelf for or when the last batches of castings were made/ machined. The 138S lasted from 1948-1994, the 139 from 1959-1978 and the SM-183 from 1969-1980.

It tends to get forgotten how much of the market for bigger than 4x5 enlargers was not to photographers, but were for all sorts of graphic arts, archives, industrial, military purposes. Quite a lot of the 8x10 and bigger machines had significant markets in the duping/ compositing/ retouching market that photoshop etc killed stone dead. It was those graphics arts markets that the vast Laborator 2400 and 3000 machines (30x30 and 30x40cm respectively) seemed in part to have been designed for.

DREW WILEY · Feb 12, 2021

The Commerical division never did make anything smaller than 5x7. The brochure link you gave Lachlan is for the consumer products division instead. But it is interesting to see an 12X16 enlarger on the long list itself, which implies multiples were made in the early 70's, since a formal model number was assigned (L3000). It's demise is probably related to when scanners were beginning to take over analogous steps in the printing industry.

The L1840 8X10 enlarger continued to be made up to 1998, it seems, but it's conspicuousy neo-, using a lot of sheet stock,
rather than mainly machined components like the classic L184, which I'd rather have (and do have). Hard to tell which plant the later version was built in.

AgX · Feb 12, 2021

ic-racer said:
I was able to get to a year 2000 [website].
Of course, only a few years after that all the darkroom stuff was gone from their web pages.

That then was in 2006.

DREW WILEY · Feb 12, 2021

I thought that 20X24 Heiland unit was one of a kind, not a production model.

AgX · Feb 12, 2021

That is why I wrote: Custom-built

ic-racer · Feb 12, 2021

Lachlan Young said:
Here's a copy of the last Durst darkroom catalogue - see if you can spot the badge engineered Ahel, LPL etc accessory products... And here's a list of production & support start/ stop dates. Somewhere in the late 90's seems to have been when much of the bigger than 4x5 machinery went EOL - ....

I'm not fortunate enough to have a hard copy of that last Darkroom catalog. My thought is that the PROFESSIONAL enlargers are not included in that catalogue because each had their own separate multipage brochures. For example I do have hard copies of some of the individual PROFESSIONAL enlargers from that era. What I was wondering is if these brochures are indeed the last ones of the PROFESSIONAl enlargers. I think the next set of brochures after these are for the Lambda printers.

Lachlan Young · Feb 12, 2021

DREW WILEY said:
The Commerical division never did make anything smaller than 5x7. The brochure link you gave Lachlan is for the consumer products division instead. But it is interesting to see an 12X16 enlarger on the long list itself, which implies multiples were made in the early 70's, since a formal model number was assigned (L3000). It's demise is probably related to when scanners were beginning to take over analogous steps in the printing industry.

The L1840 8X10 enlarger continued to be made up to 1998, it seems, but it's conspicuousy neo-, using a lot of sheet stock,
rather than mainly machined components like the classic L184, which I'd rather have (and do have). Hard to tell which plant the later version was built in.

If you read through the list, it makes clear what Durst (at least latterly) regarded as amateur and professional machines in the 'A/ P' designation column. How they actually marketed/ distributed them in each market is a different question. By the looks of it, the last of the 'classic' looking Dursts apart from the 138S were gone by the early 1980s - no idea why the 138S survived longer - it looks like Durst tried to replace it (in some of its roles) twice with the L1300 and the Optopia. I suspect the 'commercial' designation on the bigger machines disappeared in the 1980s and was replaced by the 'amateur/ professional' designations.

@ic-racer I think the last of 10x10's was the 1840N - though what its differences over the 1840 were are hard to clearly fathom (it may have been for compliance with CE regulation changes) - and it was not produced for long either.

AgX · Feb 12, 2021

Likely the Durst designation of amateur/professional product were based on the european experience,where amateurs practically did not use LF.
(But maybe I missed your point completely.)

AgX · Feb 12, 2021

DREW WILEY said:
The L1840 8X10 enlarger continued to be made up to 1998, it seems, but it's conspicuousy neo-, using a lot of sheet stock, rather than mainly machined components like the classic L184, which I'd rather have (and do have). Hard to tell which plant the later version was built in.

I find it strange to deduce from a design incorporating less molded parts that the resulting product has been no longer made by Durst.

ic-racer · Feb 12, 2021

@ic-racer I think the last of 10x10's was the 1840N - though what its differences over the 1840 were are hard to clearly fathom (it may have been for compliance with CE regulation changes) - and it was not produced for long either.

Ok found a picture of the L1840N on the Wayback Machine. I should have requested the brochure back then

Looks like they combined the EST1000N (head power supply) and the EPU1000 (chassis power supply) in to a single unit and got rid of the wheels. Maybe to improve the sales of the horizontal enlargers.

durst 138

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