Enlarging Timers
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Enlarging timers would seem to be pretty simple devices. They turn on the enlarging lamp, they turn it off again, and they measure out some desired amount of time between the two events in some repeatable way. It should be hard to design a bad darkroom timer, right? Wrong. Issues of human interface design, the timing capabilities, and so on can make what would seem a simple device a complete nightmare. I've gone through several timers, and you can profit from my suffering. Read on...Gralab 450 (Gralab Web Site)
When I resumed photography after a years long hiatus, I needed my own darkroom. Naturally, I wanted to have my enlarger hooked up to a timer. The timer I got is a Gralab 450, and to be perfectly honest, it sucks. The most irritating thing about it is that it does 0-10 seconds with .1 second resolution, and then abruptly shifts to 1 second resolution, so if I want, say, 10.5 seconds, I'm out of luck.
Beyond this serious misfeature, I disliked the following:
- although the timer can make beeps for each second that passes, and a longer beep at the end of the timed interval, the beeps are at a frequency and tonal quality that grates on my nerves and makes me feel like the fillings are going to fall out of my teeth. I know it's a small thing, but why deal with a device that sounds horrible?
- The buttons to control display brightness and the controls to control the beeps are cleverly located where they get knocked when I adjust the knobs to change the time, with the result that I often turn the beeps off or on without intending to do so, or turn the display off.
- The timer, for some reason, cannot be set up with my LPL enlarger so that the enlarger cooling fan runs all the time, with the timer controlling just the lamp. Instead, I must have the entire power supply for the enlarger switched on and off, a minor but nonetheless annoying issue.
- There's no switched outlet for a safelight.
- Despite these misfeatures, the damn thing was not cheap.
These faults finally drove me to replace the Gralab 450.
Searching the market for a good timer that didn't suffer from these faults, I decided on the...
Saunders/LPL ET-500
I disliked the Gralab timer so much that I replaced it. After much searching, I settled on the Saunders/LPL ET-500, which offers 0.1 second resolution from 0.1 up to 99.9 seconds, and 1 second resolution from 1 up to 999 seconds. Unlike the Gralab 450, it has a safelight outlet, and the metronome beep is not nearly as abrasive (nor as loud) as that of the Gralab.
Alas, less than two weeks after buying this timer, it started malfunctioning, with the timer leaving the light on at the end of the timing cycle, resetting to random times, and generally behaving as possessed. In the short time since I bought this timer, it's managed to ruin about $20 worth of paper. At this rate, it would be cheaper for me to run over the timer with my car and buy a different unit. You wouldn't think that building a timer which works for more than two weeks would be a tough job but apparently it's too tough for Saunders/LPL. Too bad, since it cost a fair piece, and getting it fixed or exchanged will leave me without a working timer for some period of time. I would recommend heartily against someone else buying one.
Driven by the failing ET-500, I once again surveyed the marketplace, and this time decided to blow the big bucks on a...
RH Designs StopClock Professional
RH Designs Stopclock timers have as their major selling point the fact that they adjust the time in logarithmic (rather than linear) steps. You can tell it, for instance, that you'd like each coarse adjustment of the time to be, say, 1/4 stop. Each time you hit the 'up' button, the timer adjusts the time upward by 1/4 stop; likewise down with the down button. Since I think in terms of stops when printing, this seems like a natural and obvious way for an enlarging timer to work; so obvious that you wonder why all enlarging timers don't work this way.
The StopClock Professional is touted as the all-singing, all dancing timer model in RH Designs lineup of timers; it has two programmable channels, multiple memories for dodging/burning in each channel, can adjust times in increments as small as 1/24th of stop. Models without the memories are available for somewhat less money, but I decided to splurge. There's a model designed to work with cold light heads, too; it has a sensor to monitor the light output, rather like the Metrolux Redlight.
In addition to this f-stop orientation, the timer has two channels, which can be used independently. Each channel is programmable, so that you can program in burn and dodge times (naturally, all burns and dodges are based on the base exposure, so that if you adjust the base exposure, the burns and dodges all change, too). The two channels can be used in tandem for split-filter VC printing.
The timer will turn off your enlarger lamp after five minutes if you inadvertantly leave it on. The passage of time is marked by a unobtrusive 'tick', not an obnoxious 'beep'. If you use a stabilizer that requires a start-up period, the timer will happily account for the start-up time independent of the exposure time.
To top it off, the timer has what I've always wanted - a test strip mode. The timer generates the base exposure time for the first patch of the test strip, then generates incremental exposures for each subsequent patch. Naturally, the increments are in fractions of an f-stop (selectable by the user). No longer will I suffer through 3 seconds being too large a step at the beginning of the test strip and too small at the end. For people who use windows to generate test prints rather than incremental stripes, the timer can generate the series of exposures for that, too.
I've been using the StopClock Pro heavily for months now. Never a hiccup. The solid build and sensible design have been a joy to work with - I just can't recommend the thing highly enough.
So far I've found only one thing to gripe about: the timer comes with the outlets in the back being not standard 120v outlets, but instead IEC style outlets like those used for monitors on PCs. This necessitates either changing the plugs on your enlarger and safelight, or else fabricating adaptors. RH Designs supplies connectors, so I sacrificed two extension cords to make adapters rather than altering the cords on my enlarger and safelight (couldn't modify the safelight, it uses a 'wall wart' power supply). Since then, enough people asked me about it that I tracked down a source for the adapters - www.iec.net/m1304.html is the URL for an outfit that sells them. Caveat - I've not done business with these guys, although people who have followed this up say they are fine to do business with.
But for now, I think I may finally have found a timer that not only doesn't drive me up a tree, it makes me happy. This thing is great. Not only is it very capable, but it's sufficiently well thought out that it took me only a short time to learn how to use ALL its capabilities. The manual is concise and well written, and although the timer can do a lot, it isn't horribly complicated in practice.
RH Designs ZoneMaster II
Oh, I know what you're thinking - "Jeez, just what the world doesn't need - another black and white exposure meter. We've already got the Ilford EM-10, the Jobo, and a slew of others, all of which are of limited use."
I know that's what you're thinking, because that's what I thought when I first saw it on the RH Designs web page.
But you're wrong. The ZoneMaster is, indeed, another black and white exposure meter, but it's different. Really.
Until a few days ago, my poor ZoneMaster II, ordered at the same time as my StopClock Pro, had been sitting, unused, in my darkroom for months. Many months. I'm a creature of habit, and despite my excitement when I ordered the thing, when it arrived I found I lacked the drive to change my printing technique to incorporate it.
But this week, faced with the daunting task of making 8x10 proof prints of about 150 images, I overcame my inhibitions against learning to do things a new way, calibrated this thing, and boy, am I glad I did.
In use, it's not like the *other* meters. No frosted integrator to put in the light path, no averaging of readings. You pop the negative in the enlarger, turn on the lamp, flip the white light lever, and meter a highlight on the baseboard. The ZoneMaster II figures out the exposure to get that reading to be a barely textured highlight.
Now comes the good part. If you meter another spot, the ZoneMaster II doesn't tell you a new exposure, it tells you what print tone you'll get at that spot. You can meter a boatload of spots, and it will tell you what tone you'll get for each, by lighting up a new segment on that display next to the gray scale (see picture above).
But you don't have to accept the suggested exposure. If that highlight you metered should be darker, use the up and down exposure keys, which run the exposure up and down in fractional f-stops (a la the StopClock). As you adjust exposure, all the lighted segments move around to tell you how thing will shift.
What's more, you can tell it what contrast grade paper you'll use, and it moves all the dots around in the same way. It even will handle the exposure changes when you change paper contrast, a pretty good trick.
To make matters better, it connects to a StopClock Pro, and automatically transfers the exposure time to the StopClock.
One nice featue of the ZoneMaster II is that it can be used as a baseboard densitometer. To see how well it functions in this mode, I used it to read a calibrated step wedge I own, by placing the probe on my enlarger easel, turning on the enlarger lamp, and then laying the step wedge atop the probe so that successive steps of the wedge were read by the probe. The readings from the ZoneMaster II were always within 0.03 logD of the calibrated values, and usually within 0.02 logD.
At first I thought the compensation for reciprocity departure didn't seem to match the papers I use, so long exposures seemed to come out slightly darker than the meter expects. I am investigating this more thoroughly. Richard Ross, one of the principals of RH Designs, suggested that part of the problem might be that the aperture settings of my enlarging lens might not be particularly accurate. To check this, I measured the light from each setting using the densitometer mode. To my great surprise, only one change (f/8 to f/11) is even close to a one stop change; the others vary from .8 stops to 1.2 stops, quite a variance. (The lens in question is a 150mm f/5.6 Rodenstock Rodagon). My remaining task is clearly to go back and make prints using the suggested exposures at several different f-stops and see how closely the prints match. At this point, I'm assuming that the unexpected changes in exposure I was seeing are in fact due to the inaccuracy of the stops of my enlarging lens.
In the dark, I often hit the key to switch paper channels instead of the clear key. And the integration with the StopClock is sort of weird - you'll get 16 seconds on the ZoneMaster and 15.9 on the StopClock, etc.
And finally, the time it takes to take a reading can be frustratingly long - but I suspect this is time spent waiting for the enlarger lamp to settle down to a constant level of light output, and not the fault of the ZoneMaster II.
But for production printing, or to just get a close first shot for fine printing, this thing is pretty nice. Very nice.
Ok, it's really, really nice. After about 150 prints with no test strips, no wasted paper, and a lot of saved time, I'm not about to give this baby up. No way.
Those 150 proof prints were far easier than I had any right to expect - I think I wasted two sheets of paper when making the 150 proofs - both times because I messed up, not because the ZoneMaster II did. By the end of the job, I had so much confidence in the exposures that I would expose four different prints, then run them through the tray line in groups of four, a tremendous time saver over running each individual print through on its own.
And to top it off, I handed the first batch of 25 prints I made with the Zonemaster to a friend, with the usual comment that "These are just *proof* prints, they're not useful except to figure out which images are worth bothering with further." He shuffled quickly through the stack, and then commented "Hey, these are pretty damn good looking for mere proof prints."
And that's high praise, indeed.
