I’m looking for budget friendly medium format capable light source and I’ve found this:
At a local market for 20$ and my question for you all more experienced people, what’s your opinion? Worth going for that light or is it better to buy some kind of more recent / LED light source? I can’t find any CRI rating for the lamps there except for “Graphiclite viewing systems feature. Graphiclite 100 Color Viewing Lamps which are manufactured to tight GTI custom specifications, assuring the highest accuracy and efficiency”. No idea what that means.
I’m shooting mostly 135, so medium format is just something I want to experiment with for now (especially that I bought a box of 20ish 120 films expired in '50-'90s for 15$ few weeks ago) so I’m looking for something cheap that will let me see more or less which films are worth scanning in lab.
Hi there @payel, welcome to the forum. I see from your link that it is 16.1" x 5" x 15" so I’m guessing that it is fluorescent tubes, and given that it originally cost $520 I’d say that they would be high quality ones. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be the best light source for digital camera scanning but honestly, for $20 I’d say go for it. Advertised highish CRI figures don’t necessarily mean that either. I’ve used a similar (UK) Hancocks light box, with special daylight tubes, and that was absolutely fine.
Now you’ll never be able to find replacement tubes but you will be able to refine the rest of your setup to copy medium format, obviously for black & white the colour won’t matter anyway. You will need to check the evenness of illumination because that didn’t need to be absolutely uniform for viewing slides. Perhaps the current LED equivalent might be the Kaiser Slimlite Plano, and that has a very good reputation for camera scanning. Note that ‘viewing’ panels are a lot dimmer than those designed as video lights so shutter speeds will be slower, but if the rest of your system is solid and stable that needn’t matter.
(obviously you’ve got to hope that it works and that it has the original tubes in)