Should I go digital or regular darkroom?

R

Rob

Guest
I have done some darkroom stuff in the past. I now have a
Bogen 22a special with Nikkor 50mm F2.8 and vivitar 75mm
lens and neg carriers to do 35mm and 6x6. I do not have it
all setup in my spare bathroom yet. I have used XP2 in the
past due to the C41 machine could do a better job than me
in processing film. Ok so I got this stuff minus chemicals and
ilford contrast filters...BUT maybe I should just get a scanner
and do things digitally? I have no clue what a good scanner
would cost, suppose I would need a better printer and some
software and more memory...What does everyone else here
use? I suppose I could sell the darkroom stuff to finance the
scanner if needed. Any suggestions wanted.
Thanks
Rob
 
Rob, this is a hard call. Quite frankly, there's nothing like a REAL B&W print made in the wet darkroom. But what a pain it is to set up temp darkrooms and keep all the chems and papers fresh.

My enlarger is sitting in my basement and I haven't pulled it out for years. But that's just me. Everyone's different.

I chose the scanner route. I still use trad silver-based B&W films like HP5+ and Tri-X, and those I develop myself using a changing bag and Patterson developing tank and reels. Keeping some HC-110 or Rodinal on hand is easy because they have tremendous shelf life and once a year I mix up a fresh gallon of Kodak fixer.

There are many good scanners to choose from. The 'best buy' seems to be the Minolta Scan Dual IV which scans up to 2700dpi which is enough for very good 11x14 prints. Up the scale from that are the Nikons, Canons and the Minolta Scan Elite 5400 (which I own). A 4000dpi or better scanner will get you into the 16x20 range with no interpolation.

Printing is the achilles heel of B&W. Few home inkjet printers do a really good job on B&W unless you go way up to something like the Epson 2200. However, I've found that if you turn the final image into RBG mode from greyscale and add a little bit of toning in Photoshop, these come out quite well when I send them off to a printing service.

Because I shoot in mixed format -- film and digital -- I prefer to do all my post processing in digital.

But if you have the time, space, and patience, nothing beats a wet darkroom B&W print.

Gene
 
Gene said:
There are many good scanners to choose from. The 'best buy' seems to be the Minolta Scan Dual IV which scans up to 2700dpi which is enough for very good 11x14 prints.
Printing is the achilles heel of B&W. Few home inkjet printers do a really good job on B&W unless you go way up to something like the Epson 2200. However, I've found that if you turn the final image into RBG mode from greyscale and add a little bit of toning in Photoshop, these come out quite well when I send them off to a printing service.
Click to expand...

I'd agree with just about everything Gene says, only maybe more so. I got rid of my enlarger years and years ago, but that was because I didn't have time for it then, and now I've restarted it is digital only.
I'd strongly endorse Gene's suggestion of the Minolta Dual IV - I have one and I'm very pleased with it. Maximum resolution is 3200 DPI - I think it was the Dual III that was 2700. However, it only does 35mm (and APS with an optional adapter). For 6x6 you'll need something further up-market.
On inkjets for printing B&W, I'm not sure if the problem is in the printers or in the B&W file. If you are starting from a B&W negative, you may be able to improve things by tweaking the brightness curve. You can certainly get better results from color originals by mixing the channels, rather than by just desaturating or going to greyscale. This allows you to apply "digital colored filters" AFTER taking the picture.
Best of luck whichever way you choose to go.
John
 
Yikes! Looks like lots more techno words to learn before I jump
into digital stuff...Channels, brightness curves, RGB mode,etc...
Well I am in no hurry, gear will get better and cheaper the
longer I wait, just like the digital cameras have.
 
The Epson 4870 is an amazing film capable flat-bed scanner. I bought one a few weeks ago.
Film Holders included: 35mm neg, mounted slides, 120/220, and 4X5 inch.

These are easy to use. I tried my cousin's Cannon 2400. The film holder is very frustrating to get the strip in place and then much cursing is reguired to straighten it.

Epson Specs from the sales blurb...
OPTICAL RESOLUTION: 4,800 x 9,600dpi with Micro Step Drive
PIXELS/LINE: 122,400 pixels (20400 x 2 line x 3 colours)
OUTPUT RESOLUTION: 25dpi to 12,800dpi (50 to 6,400dpi in
1dpi increments, 12,800dpi performed with zoom function)
GRAYSCALE: 16-bit (65,536 grayscale levels)
COLOUR: 48-bit (281,474 billion colours)

This model has a blue coloured light in the lid which shines down through the film and onto the "camera". A white light is used for conventional scanning reflected from below.

I paid Aus$715 (US$517). There's dust removal software included. No matter how much you blow off the strips and wipe the scanner surface, there's often a dark spec in the middle of a blue sky. This software is brilliant in that scenario, but has trouble when the background is dark or multi coloured - and the dust fleck is also dark.

My PC is a few years old, Pentium III, 600Mhz, with 400MB of RAM, and a couple of 17GB hard drives, WinXP. Nothing special. It copes easily with high resolution scanning. Roughly, a 35mm slide or neg at 4800DPI produces a 130MB uncompressed TIFF image file. For posting here these are re-sized to a fraction of the original size, and saved as JPEG with compression, end result is 50KB file.

The printer is also an a few years old, but still going strong. Epson Photo Stylus 870. For my simple needs the results are excellent.

Everybody has different ideas about what suits them and collecting views and opinions is a smart thing to do. Good luck with the leg work.
 
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Just found this forum this morning and wanted to comment on this thread:

The Minolta DS IV does a great job with 35mm film (at least B&W films; experience with color pos and neg has been limited) once you get over the learning curve of deciding what a good scan looks like.

For output, inkjets have come a long way. There are the more recent Epson and HP inksets to look at, but most of the "serious" digital B&W printers seem to be using carbon-based inksets from MIS or those Piezotones guys.

I spent $140 a couple of months ago to play with this form of output, and bought an Epson C84 and MIS inks for it. I've got to say, I'm really impressed with the quality of the output -- the image printed at home is the same color in different light sources (unlike the Epson stock inks), should be incredibly lightfast, and home-made printouts look better than Frontier prints of the same image via Walmart.com (though that might be my problem).

I'm not getting stunning output yet, but it took me months in a traditional darkroom before I learned how to tune the process to get the results I wanted. The test images others have made are very impressive though, and hopefully more practice and bookwork will teach me how to navigate Photoshop's controls properly.

It's renewed my interest in personal photography, after losing my darkroom to a move years ago. You should give it a shot.
 
Thanks. It looks like that is the way I have decided to go.
I put my darkroom stuff on the classified section here.
I will get a scanner in a couple months but in the meantime
I got a digital Nikon Coolpix 2200 to start learning with.
In one night with the book I have figured out all its functions
and even used it to put some of my photo items on Ebay.
 
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