Aristo dimmer for Zone VI lamp?

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I never thought I would see the day that my enlarger lamp would be too bright, but my Zone VI cold light is even with both supplemental diffusers under it , forcing me to stop down the lens into diffraction range.

I'm wondering if the Aristo solid state dimmer will work with my lamp. I'm trying to avoid ND filters.

I emailed Calumet a week ago with no response so far. Aristo's web site has it and it looks promising.

-- Hal Hardy (hal__hardy@juno.com), May 20, 2002

Answers

Yes the dimmer will work.You may want to run the Zone VIII developing time test. Cold lights give better results with denser negatives.

-- Richard Ritter (rrlg4mat@sover.net), May 21, 2002.

If you can find a used Zone VI Cold Light Stabilizer (discontinued) at a reasonable price, you can use it as a dimmer, even without hooking up the photocell (which normally has to installed separately for Aristo heads). If you turn down the lamp intensity by at least 25% you should get excellent stabilization as well with this unit.

-- Michael Feldman (mfeldman@qwest.net), May 21, 2002.

Thanx. After pricing a filter holder and a couple of ND filters, there was no price difference to speak of and in the case of Kodak filters, the dimmer is actually cheaper (surprise).

-- Hal (hal__hardy@juno.com), May 21, 2002.

The D750 Lamp Dimmer can be used with all Aristo Cold Light Enlarging Heads. It's available from B & H Photo ($89.95). At their web site go to PHOTO > ENLARGERS & ACCESSORIES > ACCESSORIES FOR COLD LIGHT HEADS.

-- Dave Pettrow (tedeum13@yahoo.com), May 22, 2002.

The D750 dimmer has arrived and this is a follow up report.

Not only does it work as advertised, but has an unexpected benefit- the lamp has virtually no warm up period when I start an exposure! That means I can take the compensating tic-toc timer off and replace it with the old mechanical Gralab. One less wire to mess with. I wonder why this isn't mentioned in the product description?

Anybody wanna buy a Zone VI tic-toc timer? :-)

-- Hal (hal__hardy@juno.com), May 29, 2002.



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