Durst L1200 with CLS450

Hello to all! As of yesterday I'm a proud owner of L1200 with CLS450 enlarger for my 4x5 negs!!!
What a beautiful peace of equipment it is. Can any one suggest me a place where I can buy a manual for it? Is there any authorized Durst service centre in Canada or USA? How difficult is to use this color head to work with VC papers? I currently have LPL 670 with VCCE head.

Thank You.

Here's a link to Jensen Optical in Portland for the manual.
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Jensen may eventually handle 4x5 stuff, now that Jobo is (apparently) folding, as they were the authorized US dist. for 4x5 durst equip, at least to my knowledge. He (Jensen) also has the bulbs for this unit.
Other durst parts are somewhat scarce, as I've been piecing together neg holders for about ten months.

This co. also has stuff on occasion:
http://www.webwoods.com/stonemills/...SubCategoryID=225&do=list&Module=ShoppingCart

Try Stonemills - he has both the operating and service instructions as well as spare parts for Durst equipment.
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He is located in Yarker. Ontario - near Kingston I think

Gord

darekj said:

Hello to all! As of yesterday I'm a proud owner of L1200 with CLS450 enlarger for my 4x5 negs!!!
What a beautiful peace of equipment it is. Can any one suggest me a place where I can buy a manual for it? Is there any authorized Durst service centre in Canada or USA? How difficult is to use this color head to work with VC papers? I currently have LPL 670 with VCCE head.

Thank You.

Click to expand...

As of last year Jobo was still sending out copies of the manual... I don't see any reason to spend money on this. As for using the color head to work with color papers- here's a table of filtration settings that are working for me with my CLS500 head:

Dual colour filter settings
From the table below, read off the approximate filtration needed for each contrast step. Dual filtration values usually need longer exposure times than single filtration values, but should need less adjustment to exposure times when changing contrast.

MG Yellow Magenta
00 120Y 0M
0 88Y 6M
.5 78Y 8M
1 64Y 12M
1.5 53Y 17M
2 45Y 24M
2.5 35Y 31M
3 24Y 42M
3.5 17Y 53M
4 10Y 69M
4.5 6Y 89M
5 0Y 130M

Single color filter settings
From the table below, read off the approximate filtration needed for each contrast step. However, as the yellow and magenta filters have not been arranged to equalize exposures, new exposure times will have to be recalculated when the contrast is changed

MG Yellow Magenta
00 120Y
0 70Y
.5 50Y
1 40Y
1.5 25Y
2 0
2.5 10M
3 30M
3.5 50M
4 75M
4.5 120M
5 130M

The manual I have seen is not worth buying. It's little more than a diagram with a list of the various controls... About the only thing that is not obvious is how to rotate the head to the horizontal (there are red locking levers on each side). Everything else is as you would expect.

At http://www.ilford.com/html/us_english/bw.html there is a PDF document called Contrast Control that explains how to use a colour head with Ilford VC paper - it is much the same with other papers.

Cheers, Bob.

The manual bob describes is one I have seen others promote as the Durst manual, but is little more than a promotional brochure. I have in pdf form the l1200, AC 1200, Elite and tim 2000 manual. It covers CLS 501 head, but not the 450. It is a pretty good manual and a requirement if you own the AC or Elite models.

If you can't get a hard copy that covers your model drop me a pm and I will burn you a cd and send it out.

A manual shouldn't be necessary for someone with mechanical apptitude. Mostly the controls are fairly obvious. The ways to use variable contrast papers with color heads are not specific to the CLS 450, so you can learn from some general articles. I like the two by Paul Butzi: http://www.butzi.net/articles/colorthe.htm and http://www.butzi.net/articles/vcce.htm. The head uses ELC bulbs -- you don't need one that has been relabeled Durst or sold by a Durst distributor.

But a manual might reveal one useful feature that you might otherwise miss, so perhaps a manual would be worth the money. Currently Durst is distributing directly to the US: http://www.durst.it/shop/. There list of manuals includes the L1200 manual in PDF form for $26.5. I find the price rather expensive, but it's an option. The paper copy that I have has some info about the CLS 501, which is similar but not identical to the CLS 450. (I'm guessing that the PDF is the same as the paper manual that I have -- about 20 pages.) The current L1200 is also different from the original version, which is probably what you have, guessing that your chassis is contemporaneous with the CLS 450 head.

I concur that the manual isn’t much good from the operation point of view, but I have found it useful for the list of components. These, as with all Durst products, have rather odd names; perhaps they lose something in the translation from Italian.

Thank you all for help! I was able to get service manual in .PDF file about CLS450 head, very informative. If any one wishes to have a copy, just e-mail me. I e-mail durst in Italy about service centre in Canada, and I was lucky! They (Durst) e-mail me back saying that they do have a company in Toronto. I phoned them, very nice people. I ordered new bellows from them, CAD$119.00 and it is coming from Italy. My old one was in very poor condition. Any way, so far I’m very impress with L1200, it looks very solid and hard to kill machine. Here is the contact of Durst certify centre in Toronto.

Macula Technik Inc.
6A-49 The Donway West, Suite 348
Toronto, Ont. M3C 2E8
PH: 905 690-1544

Thanks again
Darek J.

When you remove the head, be sure to follow the warning on the side of the chassis: "Lock before removing head". This is so that spring doesn't cause the sliding part to fly upwards. As an additional precaution, I prefer to remove the head with the head at full elevation, so that it can't slide upwards.

Hi ,

Im a new user of Photrio, and I search the user manual and service repair, of this enlarger head, but the problem is not possible send a mails to users in private,

Thanks for your help !