I have been meaning to post my Beseler 23C III XL frankenstein’ed copy stand. Works great for any size film and can quickly shift from 35mm to 4x5 or more in seconds. Got 2 enlargers at a local government surplus auction for $12 total. Use the Valoi system with CS Lite and light “enhancing” sheets, with a Staticvac film duster (lucky local find) and Panasonic Lumix S1R usually with a Sigma 70 ART. But considering the Sigma 105 ART soon for another project to get a native L-mount.
Experimented removing all the parts, bellows, light housing, etc. Lots of sturdy metal with pre-drilled and pre-threaded holes to utilize. Added a 200mm arca rail on a clamp to get plenty of space below the plate for the film holders for my head. Later added a NiSi macro rail for more easy fine-tuned control but I already had that for other projects, it is not 100% needed. Placed some anti-vibration pads under the whole thing, its quite heavy. I am unclear how much they help but they were cheap.
They look unused, fancy seeing those locally, nice purchase. Actually for such a giant enlarger the baseboard is quite modest at 16" wide which is ideal for film copying.
Is that NISI rail OK used vertically, I’d thought that there might be some play off the rail? The only alternatives to this design are things like the Novoflex Castel M, or linear stages from the likes of Velmex or Newport, very expensive though unless you get lucky.
The trick with play is to always adjust the setting from one side.
iI a vertical setup this means to first lower the thing beyond perfect and then raise it again until perfect.
I’ve finally found a Tmax film from 1983, carefully developed with
Xtol Kodak (which was recommended at the time). So I’ll be able to do a
more serious test next week.
It’s not true that color films are all tabular grain. In fact, there
are many types: tabular (Kodak Ektar or Portra), cubic, octahedral…
Conclusions :
if my next test invalidates the poor results obtained previously, I’ll
have to test each of the color films to be digitized, with a good chance
of obtaining interesting results,
if, on the contrary, my test confirms the previous results, then we’re
not out of the woods yet. But there is still hope of saving some films.
Thanks, I was really thinking of play between the camera/lens assembly and the rail that it travels down. When used horizontally that wouldn’t matter because of the weight but vertically it might allow ‘chatter’ that could promote the effects of vibration. The Nisi and others like it are (I think) mainly designed to be used horizontally for either straight macro photography or focus stacking. I don’t know about the Novoflex Castel M but engineering linear stages like those from Velmex and Newport are fully supported on ball bearings to tight tolerances. I was lucky enough to acquire a Newport 431 with a Starrett micrometer, it’s a luxury for me, it’s not as if I’m using a 100MP GFX, but it’s nice to have.
Everything that needs to move will have some play, unless it can be clamped tightly.
Using s spindle driven rail vertically with a weigh attached to the sleigh will lead to some play in the form of angular mis-adjustment that, due to play, however small it might be, makes room for vibrations or vibration transmission. Even if there is a clamp like in Novoflex’s Castel rails, elasticity is still allowing some vibration.
In order to reduce vibration to an absolute minimum, all components that link the negative to the camera sensor must be as sturdy as possible (within one’s budget). My current prototype setup solves that problem as shown here, albeit with the mentioned caveats. Nevertheless, I can move the upper edge of the setup without seeing any motion blur in the scans. Adjusting the rig for minimal edge waste takes a few steps of iteration though.
@Harry , the newport stages really look good, even though the specified max. vertical loads seem relatively low with 67N - and I’d not refuse to use one if I had one
The Newport sounds interesting, have you pressed it into service yet? I think we all would like to see how you’ve set it up? My Velmex (with no clamp) has no play that I can determine, especially compared to my previous iShoot rail mounted vertically.
Yes. you’re right, before I happened across it on the auction site I would never have known anything about it and I wasn’t sure that it would work, I even asked the seller and he wasn’t sure either. It’s all bolted in place on my copy stand and works extremely well but I will endeavour to take some photos of it both on the copy stand and off so that I can explain how it works. Obviously it isn’t made for photography and so the threads are different, but there are lots of them so I found it quite straightforward to make it work. The latest version is the 433 I think and mine came with the vernier micrometer, probably the SM-25 but I’ll need to check.
I’m in the UK where you just don’t see them really so it was a great piece of good fortune, you don’t see Velmex either, at least not when I’ve looked.
Yes my Beseler 23c XL’s are basically unused except for a broken bellows and a missing lens and filter set on one. (Aside: The other was complete. It’s waiting for my other project… to become the base for a UV enlarger I want to built for large cyanotypes!)
The NiSi rail works great. The enlarger as a stand is so wildly adjustable that I can correct for any sag so I honestly don’t know if the NiSi has issues.
It will lose perfect critical focus but just barely and not quickly at all. I honestly think when I bump that table the vibration is the cause more than time or weight/gravity?! I’d love one that could tighten down more perfectly but use what you got, right!? I could remove it and use the focus stage of the enlarger but very very fine micro movements aren’t the best with it. Then I get to use that stage to switch super quickly to 120 or 4x5
Canon EOS R7
Canon EF100mm f/2.8 Macro
Canon tripod mount clamp
Sirui baseplate and lens support
Smallrig Arri style baseplate
Laminated bamboo boards and metal parts from a local DIY store
Negative Supply Basic Film Holder 120, Model II on a cardboard mask
Kaiser Plano, should be below the wooden base, needs more sweat though
Note that the lens clamp is screwed directly to the Sirui baseplate. It improves rigidity and takes less adjusting. Boards are about 1 x 17 x 17 inches, brackets support loads of 150 pounds each, they were not perfectly right angled, so I had to adjust that with washers. They come in different thicknesses, or, if I wanted it to be more precise, I’d use blades from a feeler gauge as shims.
Total weight? About 20+ pounds? The wobbly part of the rig is still the clamped lens, but the lens support improves stability greatly. If I used a lens and bellows setup, I’d mount the bellow’s base to the vertical board without anything else. Any additional length of material adds elasticity and wobble.
The camera is in a cage which is not necessary with the lens fixed to the rig. It’s also turned 90 degrees to accommodate scanning 645 negatives with minimal pixel loss. For 135 film, I’d rotate the lens and would have to adjust things again. So I’ll do the MF material first and the 135 later.
For larger negatives, I’ll replace the R7 by a 5DIII and/or stitch several captures in post.
Yes, it is. If you look closely, you’ll see something like a base layer/plate. It’s 10mm thick. The dovetail adds more stiffness against front-back movement, so no worries here.
Compared to a center column design, front-to-back and left-to right (or any mix of it) bending is inhibited by form and strength of materials. Laminated wood is also more rigid than, say, an extruded Aluminium column of comparable dimensions. Others use a similarly rigid construction as far as vertical setups go. Horizontal setups are easier to build for stability…but I like to have the films sit flat on a level surface.
No, it’s black like almost anything you buy for video (or photo) right out of the factory (or local store in my case). As you can see, I replaced the original (black) rods with steel tubes from a DIY store, not because I don’t like black, but because the tubes are coated against rust and that coat makes the rods a little bit thicker and kind of sticky, which makes adjustment easier because they don’t shoot out of the rig if you loosen the wrong screws.
If you want more details, get in touch via private message please.
Carried over from the other thread, it looks from the photo that your 120 holder could be turned through 90º but then the actual film strip would have nowhere to go. Someone adopting a similar desigh could either fix the back board a bit higher or if they had access to a router they could rout a suitably sized slot for the film to go through, protected with some kind of soft material of course. The basic model of the Bowens Illumitran (i.e. without the Contast Control Unit so a simple upright support) had such a slot for 35mm film.
I’m thinking aloud here, for my own benefit really. Your lens collar easily facilitates turning the camera through 90º. Anyone using a bellows and an L39 repro or enlarger lens couldn’t do that.
I like the compactness of your setup. And it seems very rigid. I’d never thought of the video lens support before but its a great idea for rotating for other formats or stitching and very easy to shim.
Do you feel there are any improvements to make?
I likely won’t leave my Beseler 23C XL III anytime soon but I will surely take these ideas into account. Bravo!
The following is on the to-do list (or at least on the think-about-it list)
Move the lightpanel to below the baseboard
→ I do want to do that
Black boards, MDF or laminated, if available
→ reduces light pollution
Something to shield light between carrier and lens
→ in order to scan during days
Mount the vertical board a tad higher
→ The original idea was to allow the film to pass below the board and the current design was made with this - and a different holder - in mind. Moving the light should do.
If lens adapters and macro extension rings all had tripod mounts, things would be much easier. I have 2 adapters with tripod mounts. One has an arca-swiss style plate (only 10mm long), the other a Canon-style foot, but too much slack in the EF mount. Downside of these adapters is the need to re-orient the film for 135 vs 645 formats.
I was slow to respond. In fact, I did a very careful test, but the results were so ugly that I couldn’t believe they were correct. Such degraded performance could not be the fault of Kodak and its Tmax 400, whose poerformance in terms of resolution compared to the TriX was well established…
So I redid all my settings, then repeated my tests. And to make sure I didn’t make a mistake, I scanned a TriX and a Tmax with the same settings.
The strip on the left is the Trix with a 100% crop of a 36MPX. The middle strip is the Tmax treated in the same way. How to understand such horror? As far as I can make out, the tabular grains are flat and larger, but less distributed in the thickness of the gelatin. Above all, they are more homogeneous in size, with far fewer very small grains in the interstices. Is it the behavior of point light in this type of structure that fails so miserably?
To try and understand, I added a frosted glass 2.5cm above the top condenser. The result in the strip on the right. I find the difference quite spectacular. And the result is better (for my taste) than a scan with an Epson V600 at its maximum resolution of 6400 dpi, which is even blurrier.
It seems that tabular grains only like diffuse light. So it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to get good results with spot light on color films, many of which are made up of a thick sandwich of gelatin layers seasoned with a variety of tabular grains.
I also tried to process these results in post-production with my Diffusion or Sharpness module preset in Ansel/Darktable/. The result is somewhat similar to the addition of frosted glass, but not as good. This is logical, since the module’s algorithm is not quite equivalent to the optical phenomenon of diffusion.
So I hope this can help others avoid a dead end. And if by chance someone could have an explanation for such surprising results, I’d be happy.
Well the difference is spectacular, it doesn’t look as if that light source is going to work for T-Grain films. The difference when compared to the V600 scan is probably easier to explain though, credible tests with a USAF 1951 etched target show that it resolves only 1560 ppi when set to 6400. Your Nikon achieves around 5200 ppi, in terms of pixels at least.
