Incandescent/halogen ban?

[Cinema]

I’m not here to have a political debate. have never opened my enlarger but i assume with the incandescent ban i will need to stock up on bulbs as there is no comparable replacement for my enlarger since LEDs are very low in CRI. But i don’t know. Can anyone enlighten me? I have a beseler 67s. What is the spare bulb i need to stock up on? This looks about right:

BESELER 67S

Replacement for 67S (for BESELER) and others

www.interlightus.com

How will this affect other enlarger and darkroom workflow for you?

Thank you

 

[Sal Santamaura]

First, the title of this thread is backwards. There is no "LED ban." Second, specialty bulbs are exempt from the incandescent ban, so you need not stock up on anything. The ESJ halogen bulb your Beseler 67S uses is and will continue to be readily available.

 

[Cinema]

Thank you. Edited

 

[DREW WILEY]

Big discussion over on the LF forum. The kind of halogen bulbs used in enlarger colorheads and projectors are not involved. This will not affect us. It's all about phasing out traditional tungsten household light bulbs for sake of cumulative national energy saving, and this is not recent news at all. I've known about it for the past 15 yrs. It's being implemented in stages.

But it is a good idea to keep spare enlarger bulbs around, since they will inevitably go old and blow at some point, probably right in the middle of a work session.

 

[pentaxuser]

Yes I recall a thread on this here on what may have been APUG at the time and the conclusion was the same happy one as now

Not often we lay a worry to rest in effectively 2 posts

pentaxuser

 

[ags2mikon]

There is the possibility that the manufactures that make the household bulbs will also shutdown all production. The high volume of household bulbs helps to subsidize the rest of the operation.

 

[Cinema]

Exactly, i figured if production went down on halogen and incandescent the speciality bulbs will go up in price a lot. So i just ordered 2 GE ESJ 82V 85W bulbs for my 67s

 

[Don_ih]

There is the possibility that the manufactures that make the household bulbs will also shutdown all production.

More like practically guaranteed.

Although the rest of the world is not necessarily going to be so quick to stop buying incandescent bulbs.

 

[snusmumriken]

Not often we lay a worry to rest in effectively 2 posts

Don’t imagine it will stop there!

 

[DREW WILEY]

Go ahead, panic and scream the sky is falling. This is old "news" to the lighting industry. They have been preparing for it for more than a decade. It isn't a new law, but just another phase of its implementation. Incandescents were being phased out of the EU already. Do your homework and find out the facts. It's going to affect your bulb choice for a floor lamp rather than anything darkroom related. Things like flood and spotlights already have LED substitutes, quite good ones in fact if you're willing to spend about $35 dollars per bulb for architectural quality ones, which will save money in the long run over the cheap home center variety anyway, which need to be replaced far more often, and have poor spectral characteristics with resultant eyestrain.

GE ALREADY shut down all their bulb mfg some time ago. They had both a consumer junk bulb division and a high-quality commerical division. But there are still numerous other makers, along with specialty online sources with huge bulb selections. Huge numbers of low-voltage halogen bulbs are still being made, both in high quality and cheap quality, and the price is actually trending down due to improvements in mass mfg. Those are unrelated to ordinary tungsten bulb mfg anyway. And LED substitutes for those are still in their adolescence and have serious color issues. But check to see if your enlarger, if old, needs something arcane, and not routinely available anymore. All of my own colorheads use readily available bulbs.

It's always smart to keep spare bulbs on hand of any variety you need.

But now that a stampede has begun, maybe after another fifty or so posts people will move on to the next hot topic, like aliens beaming up our favorite films, and taking those away.

 

[ic-racer]

Incandescent ban

Which country?

 

[Don_ih]

Which country?

Your country. All retailers are to stop selling them by August.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Look. I've been retired 5 yrs now; and at least 5 yrs before that, distribution collectives and retail stores were officially notified that they should prepare for transitioning. The Chinese hopped on the wagon instantly and flooded the market with trashy CFL's and screw-in halogens. But the deadlines to phase out ordinary tungsten lightbulbs kept getting delayed, or there were exemptions. And there is no lightbulb police force out there to fine dealers relative to leftover inventory. But if you prefer traditional tungsten household bulbs, better buy em while you can. The big serious online bulb houses have been in compliance for quite awhile already, yet are where you can find good quality substitutes.

In other words, lighting manufacturers themselves have already 95% transitioned; and there is plenty of manufacturing going on. There's not going to be any high speed collision against a brick wall. And your dichroic halogen enlarger bulbs are perfectly safe unless they are such a rare odd variety they were discontinued long ago.

 

[Don_ih]

Look. I've been retired 5 yrs now; and at least 5 yrs before that, distribution collectives and retail stores were officially notified that they should prepare for transitioning. The Chinese hopped on the wagon instantly and flooded the market with trashy CFL's and screw-in halogens. But the deadlines to phase out ordinary tungsten lightbulbs kept getting delayed, or there were exemptions. And there is no lightbulb police force out there to fine dealers relative to leftover inventory. But if you prefer traditional tungsten household bulbs, better buy em while you can. The big serious online bulb houses have been in compliance for quite awhile already, yet are where you can find good quality substitutes.

CFLs are off the shelves, also. It's a full-on win for the LED lobby. Whatever you say about China, all LED A19 bulbs are loaded with components made in China.

Very sensible to replace a fully-recyclable glass+metal light bulb with one made from a couple of dozen electrical components in a plastic shell. Good for the environment.

But - hey! the Life Cycle Assessment says LED bulbs have a much lower environmental impact. So whatever one may naively think may be completely wrongheaded.

Until landfills are overflowing with unrecyclable LED bulbs.

 

[Cinema]

CFLs are off the shelves, also. It's a full-on win for the LED lobby. Whatever you say about China, all LED A19 bulbs are loaded with components made in China.

Very sensible to replace a fully-recyclable glass+metal light bulb with one made from a couple of dozen electrical components in a plastic shell. Good for the environment.

But - hey! the Life Cycle Assessment says LED bulbs have a much lower environmental impact. So whatever one may naively think may be completely wrongheaded.

Until landfills are overflowing with unrecyclable LED bulbs.

Well said but uhh i guess prefacing this thread with ‘i don’t want to talk politics’ was futile

 

[DREW WILEY]

I have piles of free CFL's in the closet. Don't intend to use them - they're terrible eyestrain, and miserable for color rendition. But no, I don't expect typical retail stores to carry anything other than trashy LED bulbs with deceptive labeling. Good product is out there, but at much higher pricing. And my $35 apiece LED floodlights came in individual very well made cardboard boxes, since these aren't the kind of thing WalMart is going to merchandise anyway.

Why complain, Don? Heck. Isn't Burtynsky a Canadian who has made very arty pictures of mountains of bulldozed E-waste overseas? And who needs plastic bags to put their fish fillets in anymore, when the fish is half-synthetic from ingesting micro-plastics in the ocean anyway? It's a win-win, especially if the most invasive species ever, Homos sapiens, gets thinned due to it.

The problem with making good quality classic tungsten bulbs is that they don't sell enough of them. There is an old firehouse across the bay which had a specific bulb out front burning for 115 years. But the company that made it went broke in 3 years - nobody needed replacements. The glass was too thick and the filament too strong. Too bad they went out of business long before people like us needed enlarger bulbs. I like reliability.

 

[Don_ih]

Well said but uhh i guess prefacing this thread with ‘i don’t want to talk politics’ was futile

If you have a group of people openly discussing something, eventually something characterized as "political" will arise.

There is an old firehouse across the bay which had a specific bulb out front burning for 115 years

There's a story that the light bulb manufacturers colluded to make the lifespan of the bulbs shorter. You've heard that, right?
Well, the LEDs in the new bulbs will work for 50000 hours or some such ridiculous number, but the second-rate electronic components that power them won't last more than 5000. They'll soon find replacements that won't last 3000 hours.

 

[pentaxuser]

Don’t imagine it will stop there!

Yes, how true. It was the proverbial red rag to the Photrio bull

pentaxuser

 

[DREW WILEY]

Talking about choices of quality might be tied to politics if you decide to take it in that manner; but it's a real world issue in either the darkroom or with respect to display lighting. Nobody is going to enter the serious architectural lighting or industrial lighting arena with a bluff. It's's an entirely different ballgame than casual consumer goods, or outsourcing those. LED lighting is evolving, but it's already come a long way, whether you're talking about studio and cinema lighting panels or high CRI display lighting. But you get what you pay for, and need to know where to get it. And now we're already crossing the threshold of LED panels being an option to cold lights and VC heads, although it probably quite premature to think of them as a substitute for halogen colorheads. It is the future.

As I tried to indicate, there's always been a bifurcation between how serious lighting products are marketed and the lower end retail versions. That's true of many product categories. And the high BS coefficient present in one category shouldn't be taken as universally applying to every source or every vendor. Good products are out there. and some very serious LED R&D is going on right in this area too - entirely predictable because this is the epicenter of tech.

 

[MattKing]

Small change made to thread title.

 

[redbandit]

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

 

[railwayman2]

My own view is that it is common sense to keep a few spares for any enlargers or older equipment that one hopes to use either now or in the future.
Even if obscure lamps are still made, they are likely to become more difficult or expensive to obtain.
(I have a Minox enlarger and a cine projector which came from my late Father, both are old (I'd guess 1960's or 70's?) but not "antique" and are perfectly usable, but spare bulbs have proved impossible to obtain.)

 

[Sirius Glass]

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

Try FreeStyle

 

[DREW WILEY]

First you need to identify what this or that bulb actually is, and its socket number. I'm not familiar with older Beseler gear; but it was common to ascribe their own product numbers to bulbs they were simply buying from someone else and rebranding. Photo outlets are carrying less and less in this respect. You really need to be dealing with a bulb specialty house like Bulbsdirect.com or one of their competitors. In former decades there were warehouses dedicated to strictly scientific or industrial lighting, or the AV trade, that you could walk right into and discuss and order things right at the counter. Now it's all over the phone or internet. It's even fairly easy to replace old style sockets with more modern ones to mate with newer replacement bulbs. But even the largest photo supply stores might not carry what you need.

 

[ags2mikon]

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?