Enlarger replacement lamp ?

[Iantoz]

Hi all, I am in the process of building a darkroom in the end of my garage.

I have bought a couple of second hand old style Meopta enlargers and have made one good one out of the two.

The one came with a 150 Watt lamp, and the other ( the one I am going to use ) is rated as Max 75 Watt lamp, but had no lamp fitted.

My question is this;
As I do not want to over rate the lamp Wattage would an LED lamp be suitable ?
What I am thinking of is a 15 Watt cool white spot lamp, with 160 degree beam angle.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Dai.

 

[smithdoor]

Try it may work please let me know my 150 watt 212 is still working and planing on trying a LED lamp.
Look at http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&fie...ode=qs&sourceid=Mozilla-search&tag=mozilla-20

Dave

 

[silveror0]

There are two considerations to ponder here:
1) The color spectrum of the chosen LED as well as its brightness.
2) Even illumination over the entire area of the projected image.
If you're still printing on graded papers, they are only sensitive to blue light. If you'll be using VC papers, they are sensitive to both blue and green. I've just completed a modification of my 5x7 Omega enlarger lamphouse, using an array of cool white LEDs, and I found that the spectrum they emitted was sufficient for VC and was uniformly distributed over the image area, but the warm color of the diffusion material did not allow a contrast above about grade 3. I found a diffusion material that solved that problem and can now achieve grade 5. If you'll be using Ilford VC papers, they recommend use of their under-the-lens filters with a bulb approximating incandescent color (~2800K). But you should have enough lamp output to keep your print exposures around 20-30 seconds; that should help avoid reciprocity of the paper.

 

[Iantoz]

Thank you for your input, I have order a "cool light" led lamp (around daylight 5600K) as I thought that would be a good place to start.

I have order a 4x 3Watt configuration, and I will l let you know how I get on.

Dai.

 

[CarolEverhart]

Even i also don't know how to get.....