carl_durrenberger

I'm just getting started with developing 4x5 film and am attempting to

choose the best developing method for operating under daylight

conditions. Browsing the B&H/Freestyle catalogs and performing

searches through past archives presents me with two viable options.

The Jobo sheet-feed system with roller base is one option many people

seem to like. It looks good but is also quite expensive (around $175

with a roller base).

The HP Combi tank is another candidate, although it seems to have a

very controversial reputation, specifically around agitation effects

and uneveness of development. It is attractively priced at roughly

one-third the cost of the Jobo system.

Which system do most 4x5 shooters prefer for:<br><br>

1) quality of images obtained<br>

2) ease of use<br>

3) economy of chemistry<br>

4) elegance/cleanliness of operation<br>

5) robust design that stands up to daily use<br><br>

Thanks!

The designjet series are 6-color (KCMY+LM+LC) printing systems with 4-ng dropweight; the wider-throat 8000-series are 9-color systems with 5-ng dropweight (they add two levels of grey for B&W and the new blue ink channel to achieve 9 colors total). The difference in dropweight is practically negligible with respect to performance. Both platforms use different specific inksets within the Vivera class.

The printhead architectures are fundamentally different, as they were designed for two fundamentally different usage models. The 8000-series uses disposable printheads designed for the intermittant-use, low-throughput customer. You use up the ink in any one of the 3 channels of any given cartridge and you throw it away and buy a new one. If you print a lot of photos, you could go through a lot of disposable cartridges fast because you only get around 15mL of ink per cartridge -- or around 5 mL of ink PER COLOR per cartridge, as there are 3 colors in each cartridge. But if you are a weekend warrior enthhusiast, you might not change out a cartridge for months, meaning that after a year of low-use printing, you'd probably need to change out cartidges anyway (due to time-based failure mechanisms).

The designjet series uses specially-designed printheads that are engineered and tested for liters (as opposed to mL's) of usage-based reliability. They have externally-plumbed ink supplies that hold between 28 and 69 mL of ink of EACH COLOR (as opposed to around 5 ml). As you use up your ink, you just change out the individual ink tanks, leaving the expensive, high-performance printhead intact. After going through many tanks (hundreds of ML per color), you might start to get reliability failure issues on the printhead (nozzles out, misdirected nozzles, banding) which you can fix by replacing it yourself. It is designed to be a user-serviceable system unlike Epson's.

Because the printswath of the designjet printers is nearly 1/2-inch tall (quite a bit taller than that of the disposable cartridges), you also get significantly faster throughput compared to the 8000 series. Go look at the specs and you'll see that print speed is measured in pages per minute for the designjet and MINUTES PER PAGE for the 8000-series (!).

In terms of image quality, I haven't compared the 2 systems side-by-side. I would imagine that, quite frankly, they are very comparable, with an edge going to the 8000 if you wish to print B&W or a lot of blue-laden scenes. But not a big edge; I've been consistently stunned by how awesome the 30/130/90 series output looks.

It's mostly a trade-off between acquisition cost, operating cost, and throughput. If you print a couple large photos a week, then the 8000 is probably the better choice. If you're a working photog who needs to crank out hundreds of photos a week, I'd think your usage model better fits the designjet series of printers. If your clients absolutely MUST have pigmented ink output (becuase they're stuck in an obsolete mindset around porous media and archivability), then get an Epson.

One other option is to wait for the wider (13x19) versions of the HP 8400-series printers. They are to be referred as the 8700-series.

The first models should ship in about a month and give you 9-color, dye-based printing with tightly-controlled 5-ng dropweight. When used with a swellable gelatin media (as opposed to a porous ceramic media), the HP inks should actually outlive pigmented inks used in a porous media.

I think the MSRP is going to be around $500-600 USD.

The 9 inks include 2 levels of grey and photo black, enabling nice black and white output. Also, there's a blue channel in one of the cartridges which is supposed to extend the printer's gamut to more accurately reproduce sky and water tones.

Overall, it could be a compelling alternative to the more-expensive HP 130 and the larger-throat Epson offerings. Check it out.

Like anything else, the best method of metering with a Hasselblad all depends on several factors.

Most importantly, it depends on what kind of photography you're doing. If your primary mode of shooting is street photography, where speed, simplicity, and keeping a distance from your subject are the order of the day, you want the metered prism. A handheld incident meter doesn't do you any good unless you can approach/disturb the subject to meter with the incident dome; when working from a distance, you must use reflected (spot or averaging) meters.

Regarding speed and simplicity: the reality of street shooting is that you just don't have the time to do a zone-system analysis of your subject's frame with a spot meter, calculate a nice midpoint expsosure, calculate your film's ideal speed, change out backs, AND accomplish the shot. By the time you've set your EV on your lens, the subject has disappeared. And you've potentially dropped your Sekonic onto the sidewalk in the confusion of juggling all that gear.

For this application, you want the speed and simplicity of a center-weighted averaging metering through your viewfinder. Get one of the newer LED-readout types such as the PME, PME-3, PME-5, PME-51, or PME-45. The older metered prism is significantly larger and slower, although quite accurate and rugged. You could start with that if on a budget. I used one for about a year for street photography before upgrading to a PME-3 a few months ago. I love the PME-3 for this application and make sure it's always on the 500 C/M when I'm traveling.

When the Hasselblad is on a tripod, such as in a portrait shoot, your priorities shift away from speed and move towards placing a premium on accuracy and control. That's where a nice handheld meter like the Sekonic 508 comes in really handy, as it lets you go to town with the Zone System. With both a spot meter and an incident dome/disk combined in one tidy package, you can map out your exposure range across the area of the 6x6 frame, adjusting your key light, flags, fill, relfectors until the perfect contrast ratios are achieved for the particular look you're after. Particularly when you are controlling the lighting and can approach your subject, a spot and an incident meter are mandantory in my opinion.

So, the long and the short of it is that both center-weighted averaging prisms and spot/incident handheld meters are useful to the working photog, depending on WHAT your shooting context is. I have both and use both and find both indispensable in their respective places.

Good luck!

Rowland,

Which negative stocks are currently using the 2-electrons-for-one-photon emulsion technology? I know that they are used on the Vision-2 motion picture series as per EK's marketing materials, but what about still imaging stocks? Am I correct in my suspicion that Portra-800 one of the beneficiaries of this speed-enhancing technology? What about other still imaging stocks?

BTW, I don't know if you knew of Dr. Hunt (Former Asst. Director of Kodak Labs in England) from your days at EK, but I just attended his class on color science a few weeks ago here in San Diego -- in his 80's and still going strong...