I built a small light box so I can take digital photos of the microfiche directly, and it works, but the results are not always great. Where I work we have thousands of old microfiche cards with drawings on them. Tim have a question about using a beseler enlarger. If you'd like to put such an enlarger toether, email me and I'll forward pictures, drawings and how-to info. And make your own prints precisely the way you want them, as in a traditional film/enlarger darkroom.

The best of both worlds: shoot digital, with all of its convenience and versatility, but print silver, with its incomparable look and lifespan-and at about one-dollar per 8x10, less expensively than the cheapest fade-prone machine print. The enlarger can be put together by anyone half-way handy for between $600 and $3,000. I'd like to share the how-to of it with anyone interested, the hope being that the traditional home darkroom will become common again, real, RC or fiber prints common again. I've put together an enlarger that makes traditional, real, silver-gelatin prints, 3-tray wet-darkroom prints, from digital images, results indistinguishable from film/darkroom prints.Īs with a traditional film/enlarger, any brand paper can be used, RC or fiber-based prints can be any shape or size, borders any shape or size. Home-darkroom silver-gelatin prints from digital images IMO, labs that offer digital printing to resin based B&W papers are a ripoff. Digital contact negs, or carbon ink-jet prints get close to delivering that same 'look', but digital projection to B&W paper isn't even close. Or, portraits on LF print film printed on graded panalure (back when it was still fiber and not resin crap). I miss some aspects of wet darkroom work, but only handling large format negatives printed on to top end papers like graded fiber.

Then the LightJet and Frontier hit the market, which inherently do the same thing except 1000x more efficiently than a digital head mounted in a conventional enlarger. Back in the late 90's I worked on a few systems like this that Kodak was testing and they worked fine. Carbon ink for high end ink-jet work also beats wet/digital once greyscaled correctly.īasically the OP is looking for a home version of a Durst Lambda or Fuji Froniter mounted in conventional enlarger head, which can be done (it's just a glorified digital projector), but it's illogical. Yeah.digital negs or even analog copy negs 'contact' printed onto quality B&W paper are really the way to go if you want a hybrid 'wet/dry/ workflow.

Digital photo enlarger software