Contact prints using computer monitor?

[joe g]

I'm not sure if this belongs in this forum: just wondering, but has

anyone tried making contact prints using a computer monitor?

 

This would entail basically taping photo paper to your monitor,

turning the monitor on (with the image displayed) to expose the

paper, then developing the paper as normally.

 

Would a CRT or LCD monitor work better? One would need to experiment

to find the best combination of exposure time and monitor settings

(brightness, contrast, etc.)

 

How would the results compare to inkjext? or to a regular enlarger

with, say, 35mm negs?

[joe g]

If anyone tries this out could you please tell us the results!

[jay ott]

What would be the point of going through all of that trouble? It's much easier to lay the negs down on paper put a piece of heavy glass on top and flip on the light.

[kevin_break]

The light coming from the monitor wouldn't be collimated so it shouldn't work.

[jespdj]

The pixels on a monitor are far too big and the resolution is far too low, even if you could somehow get the right exposure it's impossible to get a good, high-resolution print out of this.

[qtluong]

Jesper is right. Typically, you'd get prints that are less than 100dpi.

[aaron_van_de_sande]

This might be a way to make an enlarged negative, there are high res monitors now that would work out to about 240 dpi for an 8x10 negative. You could do your pshop stuff and than take a picture of the monitor image.

[eric_strom]

We had thought about doing something like this with high resolution LCD's... IBM (and i think veiwsonic but using the same screen) has a 200 dpi LCD display. that would allow the paper to be close enough to the image making surface to avoid the blurring you would get thru monitor glass. The issue of course would be how to control the amount of time that the display is on.... perhaps the only way to do that would be either to figure out a software way of switching on and off the light that sits behind the lcd, or by hacking the thing up to build a switch in... or taking the light out all together and using an enlarger light or something similar to shine thru the screen.

 

Perhaps setting the backlight brightness low enough (if this is adjustable) coud get the brightness when the display is showing black pixels to be dark enough to be negligable for the few seconds it would be sitting on the paper before the image is flashed up.

 

I would guess that if the technique could be perfected, and a decent solution to timing could be figured out, that this might be an interesting solution of how to use wet materials in a digital enviroment.

 

There are also companies working on making digital heads for enlargers... simillar idea, although currently lower resolution than that IBM lcd screen.