Incandescent/halogen ban?

[Donald Qualls]

They were banned here about 10 years ago and you can still go to the shop and by them and if they dont have the right one you can get it on line for delivery next day. There is probably enough stock to last another 100 years if they stop manufacturing.

From what I've seen (skimmed the article, it wasn't really news to me, either) there's a relatively large fine for the retailer (hundreds of dollars per bulb) after the deadline. I didn't catch what resources were allotted for enforcement (there are similar/worse penalties for hiring an uncertified moving company, but almost no one ever loses all their property because the enforcement budget runs out in February, most years). But as noted, this ban in the US will only be for general home lighting, medium screw base and whatever that newer twist-lock type is. Won't affect projector or enlarger bulbs, headlights, etc.

 

[Don_ih]

you can still go to the shop and by them

Retailers can face a fine of some stupid amount, like $500, per illegal bulb they sell, if caught - in the US, as of the end of August.

 

[awty]

Retailers can face a fine of some stupid amount, like $500, per illegal bulb they sell, if caught - in the US, as of the end of August.

There is an exemption on specialty bulbs. They want people to switch to low voltage LED's where possible.....its just a bit of common sense.

 

[Paul Howell]

How exactly are you using standard LED bulbs in your enlarger?

I use a standard GE 1055 bulb, same out put as a 75 watt tungsten, contrast is bit lower than a tungsten bulb, not to hard to compensate with VC paper. My negatives are scaled to print grade 2, older negatives from the 60s and 70s have more contrast and print grade 3. If I need to print grade 4 I do switch to a tungsten. Some feel that there is a afterglow, if there is it is consistent and posed no problems for me in terms of having prints darker than anticipated. I use LED in both D3 and Meopta Opemus 3.

 

[Don_ih]

There is an exemption on specialty bulbs. They want people to switch to low voltage LED's where possible.....its just a bit of common sense.

300 million people in the US, each with a light bulb. I don't see how it makes sense to replace something made simply of glass and steel with something made from 20 bits of discrete electronics in a plastic container. 300 million bulbs that are classified as non-recyclable. They are slated for landfill.
But it saves electricity. In a country mostly powered by coal-burning power plants.

 

[Sirius Glass]

The California law went into effect just as I was buying my 4"x5" enlarger well over a decade ago and the law has never cause me a problem, except that I strongly dislike the early illumination delay of the first CFLs.

 

[ags2mikon]

I use a standard GE 1055 bulb, same out put as a 75 watt tungsten, contrast is bit lower than a tungsten bulb, not to hard to compensate with VC paper. My negatives are scaled to print grade 2, older negatives from the 60s and 70s have more contrast and print grade 3. If I need to print grade 4 I do switch to a tungsten. Some feel that there is a afterglow, if there is it is consistent and posed no problems for me in terms of having prints darker than anticipated. I use LED in both D3 and Meopta Opemus 3.

Thank you for your reply. So I looked up the above bulbs and they are listed as 2700k. Last time I measured a bulb from my enlarger it was about 3200 iirc. That would explain the lower contrast. I converted my enlarger in the motorhome to 12 volt LED @ 4000K and it is 1 grade high. It does have a bit of afterglow, but it has not been a problem. Using a spot meter on the baseboard the illumination fall off is the same.

 

[DREW WILEY]

$500 fine? That's peanuts. Here it's a $75,000 fine to stock a banned quart of smoggy varnish on your shelves. But enforcement is 99.99 % nonexistent in both cases. The big box stores pay tens of thousands of dollars in fines at a time for false labeling products per country of origin or safety rating, and just factor that into the cost of those products prior to markup.

 

[Brendan Quirk]

I went to Adorama to look for bulbs for my 23c II.... havent used it wtih the plain bulb... it came burnt out..

I was assumed that the 23c II used a PH-111A bulb as the lamp holder says DRAKE 75w 125V

But cant find anything other then PH-211 on adorama and am utterly confused..


But am also confused on how the hell those bulbs are removed from the lamp socket

I have a 23CIIXL. It uses a PH-140. 75W screw base. Just ordered some from Adorama.

 

[Paul Howell]

Thank you for your reply. So I looked up the above bulbs and they are listed as 2700k. Last time I measured a bulb from my enlarger it was about 3200 iirc. That would explain the lower contrast. I converted my enlarger in the motorhome to 12 volt LED @ 4000K and it is 1 grade high. It does have a bit of afterglow, but it has not been a problem. Using a spot meter on the baseboard the illumination fall off is the same.

The folks who need to use specialty bulbs, beyond a Tungsten enlarger bulb, may experience more issues finding bulbs, some I suspect can be refitted to take a standard LED bulb. I also have a Omega Cold Light source and matching electric shutter, but the shutter is no longer working, I guess I will look into fixing it. The FL light does not work well with VC paper, as long as I can get Foma grade 2 and 3, should be ok.

 

[MattKing]

Thank you for your reply. So I looked up the above bulbs and they are listed as 2700k. Last time I measured a bulb from my enlarger it was about 3200 iirc. That would explain the lower contrast. I converted my enlarger in the motorhome to 12 volt LED @ 4000K and it is 1 grade high. It does have a bit of afterglow, but it has not been a problem. Using a spot meter on the baseboard the illumination fall off is the same.

Colour temperature is an average. With the spiky type of spectral emission from LED lamps, that average doesn't tell you much about how well the LED is matched to the colour response of darkroom papers.

 

[redbandit]

There's a conflict. If LED's reduce demand on the grid, electric vehicles raise it by a lot more. We got to make up our minds.

a current generation EV silverado takes 5 days to charge if plugged into a normal wall outlet... mere hours into a special 5000$ home charging station, that will cost about 3,000$ to install plus expenses like permits and building inspectors. And if your wiring is before a certain date... you can spend 10-20,000 more to get it brought up to code.

the 2024 silverado electric has an optional kit to use it to power the house... it supposedly will generate enough power to keep the house lights on for 21 days..


NOw the problem is... the truck doesnt generate power... it needs to go to a charge station to take power... so in essence a 400mile charge per pack will only keep house lights on for 21 days... what GM calls 7.7 kilowatt hours of juice..

In theory that is meaningless. in proof it is meaningless.

 

[redbandit]

Colour temperature is an average. With the spiky type of spectral emission from LED lamps, that average doesn't tell you much about how well the LED is matched to the colour response of darkroom papers.

What about the full spectrum ones for interior lighting... I have one and it SEEMS stable but has that 2-4 second after glow when you turn it off.

But if we use contrast filters... does spikes matter?

 

[BMbikerider]

Why the "ban" on incandescent bulbs? If LED bulbs are better then everyone will quit buying incandescent bulbs and go LED right? What is wrong with letting everyone choose what they want to light their homes with?

It is not the type of lighting used to light peoples homes it is essentially a half truth on a bulb illumination for photographic enlargers. I have used an LED bulb in a condenser enlarger with no problem except I have had to re-grade assess MG filters but with my LPL colour enlarger the supply of suitable pre-focussed halogen bulbs are not under threat. In the word of a certain ex politician 'fake news.'

 

[koraks]

What about the full spectrum ones for interior lighting... I have one and it SEEMS stable but has that 2-4 second after glow when you turn it off.

But if we use contrast filters... does spikes matter?

Such a long afterglow is inconvenient with printing, although if printing times are sufficiently long on average, and the afterglow is consistent, even this will work. However, there are plenty of bulbs out there that are more or less instant-off (and instant-on as well). I'd go for one of those. Try a couple until you find one that's appropriate.
As to the spikes; no, they don't necessarily matter. As @BMbikerider said above, you may need to re-assess the effective grades your filters give. Or just not worry about it too much and determine if you can still hit something close enough to grade 5 for your taste, and then just proceed in your merry ways. It's not always necessary to overcomplicate things to excess.

 

[ags2mikon]

The afterglow is mainly from the phosphors used to adjust color output. When I find some 12 volt 2700K LED bulbs for my enlarger I can just switch between them to get the full range. It is a no tool deal to change bulbs in that enlarger. I use them in the rest of the motorhome anyway.

 

[BobUK]

Anyone stocking up for the future should remember their darkroom safelights.
A few years ago I hoarded a load of incandescent, 15 watt pygmy bulbs.
I am glad that I did. Whenever I see them on the shelves, which is not very often, the prices have gone through the roof.

 

[Donald Qualls]

I also have a Omega Cold Light source and matching electric shutter, but the shutter is no longer working, I guess I will look into fixing it. The FL light does not work well with VC paper, as long as I can get Foma grade 2 and 3, should be ok.

I have a Zone VI cold light that came with my D2 when I got it, and it works fine with split filtering using yellow and blue (couldn't find magenta with the right cutoff) theatrical gels under the lens.

 

[DREW WILEY]

I wouldn't tolerate any phosphor afterglow in an enlarger. Typical halogen bulb warmup shift and afterglow is about half a second or less at each end of the phase. Some high end commercial enlargers incorporate a shutter to trim that off at both ends, or one could mount the enlarging lens itself into a solenoid-controlled shutter. I simply try to avoid exposures less than 10 seconds.

One of my enlargers is equipped with a big high-output 12X12 inch Aristo VC54 blue-green cold light. Those are wonderful for VC printing. I have a Zone VI compensating timer connected to it, basically what the Graphics trade would term a "light integrator", which measures the actual lumens being given off, and adjust the frequency of beeps accordingly. The the cold lamp unit itself is connected to a footswitch, and instantly turns on or off via that.

Zone VI cold lights themselves operate differently, using two different overlapping grids, one blue, one green, rather than the combined blue-green light of the more powerful Aristo. Either way, one can selectively use blue versus green glass filters under the lens for split printing or related purposes.

 

[Cinema]

Anyone stocking up for the future should remember their darkroom safelights.
A few years ago I hoarded a load of incandescent, 15 watt pygmy bulbs.
I am glad that I did. Whenever I see them on the shelves, which is not very often, the prices have gone through the roof.

I use an led that i can change to any color and it works fine. Theyre marketed towards vlogging and stuff.

 

[MattKing]

Such a long afterglow is inconvenient with printing, although if printing times are sufficiently long on average, and the afterglow is consistent, even this will work. However, there are plenty of bulbs out there that are more or less instant-off (and instant-on as well). I'd go for one of those. Try a couple until you find one that's appropriate.
As to the spikes; no, they don't necessarily matter. As @BMbikerider said above, you may need to re-assess the effective grades your filters give. Or just not worry about it too much and determine if you can still hit something close enough to grade 5 for your taste, and then just proceed in your merry ways. It's not always necessary to overcomplicate things to excess.

It depends where the spikes (and valleys) are. The sensitivity of darkroom papers varies a lot - particularly with variable contrast paper. And as most LEDs aren't sold with full disclosure about those spikes and valleys, you could find that different bulbs give radically different results, even though the labelling on those bulbs is essentially identical.
It may be the case that LED bulbs designed for the professional motion picture industry would meet the need very well - but to determine that it would be necessary to do some purposeful testing, probably with equipment not available to most of us.
I've tried a 50 watt LED equivalent to the 100 watt halogen that my LPL VCCE is designed for. The contrast behavior made both contrast scales in the head irrelevant - that behavior was extremely un-linear - and the output was lower than I'd prefer. The bulbs were cheap though, the lower heat is nice, and in a pinch the 4 pack I bought probably means I have emergency backup bulbs for life!

 

[Cinema]

Arri leds are close to 95cri fwiw

 

[MattKing]

Arri leds are close to 95cri fwiw

CRI doesn't actually deal with the issues. There are much more complex tests that are used in the commercial/professional motion picture lighting world that do.

 

[DREW WILEY]

"Blackbody" light sources like tungsten filament have a continuous spectrum, but differ in specific color temperature. But fluorescents, CFL's, and LED's all produce a discontinuous spectrum with spikes and imbalances; and therefore the best color renditions of those are actually quite expensive. CRI was a traditonal manner of expressing the statistically probability of how many of a hundred representative color patches would be properly rendered relative to human vision, according to any given lightsource. This was generally in context of opposing metamerism, where certain colors act chameleon-like under different sources. Anyone who aspires to balance a colorhead to a particular batch of color paper using a standard color reference should be acutely aware of this general principle.

But serious lighting engineers, along with pigment and dye experts, nowadays think more in terms of CIE color mapping and gamut properties, hoping to close at least a few of the loopholes. But nothing will ever be perfect. In fact, inkjet colorants are a bit of a step backwards in terms of gamut. No color film or RA4 paper is perfect either; every one of tehm has idiosyncrasies which need to be recognized.

I look at my own dried color prints not only with my expensive German color matching (5000K, CRI 98) tubes, but using several other sources too - diffuse daylight outdoors, high-end better-balanced LED spotlights, commercial fluorescent 5000K, warm tungsten, oddball CFL too if necessary. No different than what I did when our company paint color matchers came to me for a final assessment. Only half of it is physiological sight. The other half is psychological, with training and experience knowing what to look for, and how to compare, and in what light, according to the real-world conditions involved. One gets better at it over time.

 

[ic-racer]

I made a spread sheet of all the incandescent lamps I need. I found sources for all of them, just need to start ordering and stocking up.

Most difficult to find would be Durst/Thorn HX27, but I already have some, so no need to buy any more.
Next is the lamp for my densitometers. Quite an oddball and very rare, but still obtainable.

Easiest to find is the ECT 500W lamp for my Smith Victor studio lights.

All together I counted 15 different lamps I need to source.