Experience with glassless Contact Print Frame (Jobo 6835) ?

[Ljós]

Dear RFFers,

so I have an enlarger now, and can finally do darkroom work at home. And I am seriously backlogged with making contacts and prints from my negative files (pergamin by the way, no print-through-files.)

I am now looking at the different makes and models of contact print frames, and I think a cleverly constructed frame can save one a lot of time and trouble... so here goes:

On the net I have come across the Jobo 6835 print frame, and as far as I can see the selling point is that it is glassless - no hassles with keeping a glass surface clean. Also it should be quite safe to buy one used, since there is nothing delicate to get scratched etc.

Anybody have hands-on experience with this? How easy is it to "load" the frame? Is the sharpness acceptable? (I am not looking for the last ounce of sharpness in a contact print, it is more for motive evaluation/showing to relatives and friends for picking frames to be enlarged. Sharpness I can check from the negative if need be.)

I have a hard time seeing how a design like that could keep a negative strip as flat as a glass plate, but maybe it is good enough?

Anybody else who can recommend a good contact printer: bring it on! Much appreciated.

Thanks for chiming in!
Greetings, Ljós

 

[sevo]

With reasonably flat film it is easy to load, but it gets harder the curlier the film gets, and short ends of curly film will simply pop out, so you'll also need a (improvised) glass plate (and adhesive tape) in any case. Besides, glassless must be exposed with a focused enlarger or other highly directed light source - if you want to do contacts when the enlarger is not set up, it's glass time again...

But in general, contact prints for anything below 5x7" LF are merely test prints to get a first glimpse on the content and estimate gradation and exposure for enlargement. Just about every contact print frame (or indeed method that holds the negatives down on the paper - when nothing better was at hand, I successfully scotch-taped some directly onto the paper) that does not hide the margin numbers (beware, there once also was a equivalent of the Jobo made from black rather than clear plastics) will be good enough.

 

[gns]

The easiest thing to do is just get a sheet of glass cut to about 10" by 12". Lay your paper face up, place the film on it, and just lay the glass over that. The weight if the glass will hold the film flat.

Cheers,
Gary

 

[Ljós]

gns, sevo, thanks for chiming in!

Well, I am using an improvised glass plate so far (should have mentioned that, sorry), and it certainly works. But I am looking at several hundred uncontacted films, and I was simply wondering whether this method could be improved upon.

The drawbacks of a glass plate:

- handling: at some point it will scratch, or worse
- if you "hit" the exposure with the first try, yes it is a viable alternative. And I agree that ideally one should tune development and exposure in such a manner that a set exposure will turn out contacts where the negative borders print close to black.
But: - I have a wide range of films and lighting situations to print. Some films have a considerable brightness range, since I at that time used one camera body for night and daytime photography. I now have two bodies and the lighting situations on any given roll of film are now much more homogenous.)
- there is a number of films where I want to make several copies of contact prints, as giveaways and presents. Some "tell a story of a day". Doing this with a glass plate would be unneccessarily tedious - I am thinking about aligning and re-aligning the strips on the paper here.

Thanks sevo for pointing out the black vs. clear versions of the Jobo! ;-)

All the best,
Ljós

 

[MartinP]

I'd suggest that there is more wear-and-tear to the negatives on the 'clever' contact printing devices, where you slide the film into slots of some sort, than there is with a plain piece of glass/polycarbonate.

It is simple to arrange six strips of six (35mm) or four strips of three (120) or four sheets (5x4) on a piece of paper under safelight illumination (more tricky for a colour contact-sheet...). If necessary, use a cotton glove on one hand for a bit of re-arrangement. I set the enlarger head at the same height index, with the same lens/carrier, and place the paper in the same place on the baseboard (marked in indelible marker). If you need to adjust the overall exposure because of different films having different base-densities then you will quickly figure out a couple of near-enough adjustments to the time.

To produce a contact-sheet as a 'piece of art' would probably require consistent densities for each frame of course - else you'll go nuts trying to burn in individual frames separately with some sort of home-made mask.

 

[sojournerphoto]

To produce a contact-sheet as a 'piece of art' would probably require consistent densities for each frame of course - else you'll go nuts trying to burn in individual frames separately with some sort of home-made mask.

Interestingly David Hurn reckoned that producing a consistently and correctly exposed contact sheet - i.e. each fram properly exposued - was a start point for darkroom work🙂 I think that's actually quite a difficult challenge...

 

[MartinP]

I also recall the David Hurn remarks in "On Being a Photographer" (available now from Lenswork.com via Lulu). In that case, it was expected of the photographer to be able to produce consistent exposures, repeatedly, on film which was correctly developed to suit the subjects. As I read it, the ideal contact sheet was not related to 36 randomly exposed frames, but to perhaps a maximum of couple of groups of different densities. The example he gave of the students work was an extreme case, as an example of unhelpful inconsistency....
😉