I am looking for the best quality yet least expencive color enlarger head? Also a color print processor? Not the manual type that you are required to change the chemistry everytime you process a print! The good kind that they use in photo labs. Like a Day lab type thing at a price of under $200.00!! I know your thinking I'm in a dream world but there might be someone/anyone out there that might have one they want to get rid of because they nolonger have a use for it!!!! oh yeah one more thing does anyone have a price list for how much old antique Kodak, Argus, and other camera are worth??

THANX, Gabrielle D. Goodman anyone who want to see my older photographs I have a web page at:

http://members.tripod.com/~ElleG/index.htm

-- Gabrielle D. Goodman (gayla@netnitco.net), March 02, 1998

Answers

As far as I know, you don't have to change the chemistry to process a color print. I do my own Cibachrome prints with an old B-22 enlarger and an Ilford color filter pack (costs about $25). A color head is a "nice-to-have" but not required.

-- Elise Gordillo (elise29@hotmail.com), January 08, 1999.

Hi Gabrielle,

for color negative printing I have only used room-temperature RA4- chemicals with Kodak Portra paper. I have been quite pleased with the results, but less pleased with my inability to repeat the results from one darkroom session to another. The same filtering never seems to work twice, it always requires test-strips for a color-beginner like me. I pour the liquid in ordinary trays and have a darkroom lamp that has a spectral sensitivity that doesn't affect the color- paper (a DUKA). The trays costs very little of course, the lamp is more expensive but less than your $200. The chemicals are not as cheap as the version that should be heated but I'm a hobbyist so all in all this is the cheapest solution. I use a special spray to get the oxygen out of the chemical cans once I have taken the amount needed in the trays, this way the chemicals live much longer. The chemicals diluted with water and used in the trays have to be wasted after each session anyway. Beware, use only a new tray for the developer, one that never has been in contact with black & white chemicals. The two other trays can (it seems) be your ordinary b&w trays. One tray, now that is cheap, isn't it!

-- Peter Olsson (Peter.Olsson@sb.luth.se), January 13, 1999.