Durst Reporter, pocketable enlarger

ludoo · Expire: 2011-12-05

Today's flea market buy, from a nice gentleman who used to work as a printer and has tons of stories to share, is a Durst Reporter. It's a tiny enlarger that can be easily dismantled and stored in a case (which I don't have). It has a built-in red filter and is very solid and heavy, and has only minimal features, eg no space for filters, etc.

I'm particularly happy, not only for the good price (including a Radionar lens), but mainly because I have little space and this will come very handy as a light source to print 6x9 contact sheets and the occasional 35mm enlargement. And it takes up little storage space.

Here it is, with a mini Bic lighter for comparison.

GrahamNR17 · Expire: 2012-09-06

Bargain, and so useful Very Happy

I never saw one before.

Orio · Expire: 2012-12-04

looks stylish also Smile

mdarnton · Joined: 03 Mar 2012 Posts: 79 Location: Chicago

That's the first enlarger I had, around 1958 or so! After years without a darkroom, I went on Ebay recently and picked up an M301, which was, I think, the last iteration of it. It's fine up to about 10x15", but my brother made some wall-sized prints with the Reporter. There's just about nothing to go wrong with it, and I think of it as the poor man's Leitz Valoy--the whole design is basically a rip of that, made more compact.

Currently I'm using the base of my M301 as a copy stand for making digital "scans" of 35mm negatives using my Nikon D300 and 55mm micro lens (all the B&W work on my Flickr pages is done this way).

ludoo · Expire: 2011-12-05

Michael thanks, I still have to get all the rest of the stuff I need to start printing again, and I'll probably change the huble triplet it came from. But it's a cute, compact little enlarger and for what it cost, I'm sure it will do its job.

Can you expand a bit more on your scanning setup? How do you fix the camera to the enlarger column, and what are you using as a light source? Your flickr scans look great.

mdarnton · Joined: 03 Mar 2012 Posts: 79 Location: Chicago

Thanks.

I bought one of those small LED video lights with 120 or so little bulbs in it (Ebay, cheap), and put a piece of 6mm milky plastic over it, then hold the negatives in an old omega carrier on top of that. The carrier is filed out so you can see the edges of the frames, and I use the carrier upside down, which means the black side is facing the camera, and I am shooting emulsion side up. The results are better this way (not shooting through the film backing), but I have to flip the images.

The camera is mounted on a tripod head (the Manfrotto flip-flop one), which fits the 3/8" screw on the enlarger column used for holding the enlarger head on the elevating mechanism, and my D300 with the 55mm f/3.5 micro-Nikkor and an extension tube (I need to go just past 1:2) is mounted onto that. I have three micro-Nikkors of different vintages, from very early to the recent AF-D (most of the little professional type work I do these days involves small stuff in the studio), and they're all equal in this application at their optimum apertures. I tried a number of different enlarging lenses, and they weren't nearly as good as the micro-Nikkor, which is a consistently great lens.

I put a mirror on the light source and focus on the reflection of the lens, then center the lens by tilting the tripod head. When the lens is pointed exactly at itself, everything will be perfectly parallel. The lens is the sharpest just short of f/8, so I set it there. The light is so bright that I get very fast exposures, and vibration isn't a problem

Because the tonal range of the film is so small compared with real life, I turn the contrast all the way up in the camera. The histogram isn't quite filled, and I expose as far to the right as I can. I get pretty good initial results with minimal processing after, and don't seem to get any benefit from using RAW. I shoot in color, and in Photoshop invert the tonality to positive, to greyscale, and flip the image to undo the mirror view I get from shooting the emulsion side, and crop to the image borders. Then I start in with the real tonal editing, which usually involves a fair amount of shadow and highlight manipulation similar to what I used to do in the darkroom with dodging and potassium ferricyanide.

mdarnton · Joined: 03 Mar 2012 Posts: 79 Location: Chicago

In my experience this is a lot quicker than a scanner, and certainly gives better results than any flatbed.
A quick cellphone shot:

ludoo · Expire: 2011-12-05

Thanks for the great explanation, especially the way you set up the camera parallel to the film, very ingenious. I just bought (again) a Scan Dual II and I'm thinking I should have probably invested in something like your setup. If you have the time, could you post a small 100% crop from one of your scans?

mdarnton · Joined: 03 Mar 2012 Posts: 79 Location: Chicago

I think I was just able to open up my settings on Flickr so you can go to the actions/other sizes menu and see the original sizes for everything that I've uploaded there. The bit of funny grain pattern is aliasing between the sensor pixel size and film grain size, I think, that exaggerates the grain a bit.

You'll notice some blurry corners on the early ones--before I figured out the alignment solution, and I think flipping the film concave side up helps, too, to work with any natural curvature of field the lens might have, instead of against it.

One would hope your Scan Dual II would beat my camera setup.

ludoo · Expire: 2011-12-05

They look good, definitely less noise than my Scan Dual II. Problem is, my only remaining digital camera is a compact, I have to find a cheap enough camera to mount a macro lens on...

mdarnton · Joined: 03 Mar 2012 Posts: 79 Location: Chicago

I don't think I'm ever going to get a D800, but I have a Nex-7 in mind for the future. It should do the job nicely, with twice the Mp I have now. The 55mm micro-Nikkor usually costs under $100 on the used market.

ludoo · Expire: 2011-12-05

I'll look for a cheap 10Mp camera, or borrow my girlfriend's NX10...