I did; thanks for the correction.
Which densitometer?
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I did; thanks for the correction.
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@dkonigs has an enlarger timer similar to the rh designs analyzer pro in development that will have a densitometer module attachment that will be essentially a cut down printalyser.
I have the rh analyser pro and the printalyser densitometer and recommend both. Reading your posts, you seem a bit like me. I can dial up the nerdy precision when I need to but prefer to mostly just wing it.
I mention this because I think the printalyser is your current best option but maybe at the end of 2025 you might have chosen his new timer plus densitometer module. I am not sure if it will do reflectance measurements though. He has a YouTube channel with updates
The analyzer pro lets me get to a good print with fewer tests, and sometimes if I am making many prints from one roll I can print many subsequent frames with no tests at all . You need to settle on a few papers and printing workflows though because calibration is quite tedious.
I have the rh analyser pro and the printalyser densitometer and recommend both. Reading your posts, you seem a bit like me. I can dial up the nerdy precision when I need to but prefer to mostly just wing it.
I mention this because I think the printalyser is your current best option but maybe at the end of 2025 you might have chosen his new timer plus densitometer module. I am not sure if it will do reflectance measurements though. He has a YouTube channel with updates
The analyzer pro lets me get to a good print with fewer tests, and sometimes if I am making many prints from one roll I can print many subsequent frames with no tests at all . You need to settle on a few papers and printing workflows though because calibration is quite tedious.
I don’t know anything about the dkonigs devices but you guys might suggest a similarly budget-friendly sensitometer next 
. When it comes to sensitometry - particularly with film - exposure is the more cumbersome and/or tricky part of the procedure, and where people often go wrong.
. When it comes to sensitometry - particularly with film - exposure is the more cumbersome and/or tricky part of the procedure, and where people often go wrong.
I've not come across one, yet. I've played with the idea of building one and did some conceptual groundwork on it, but haven't gotten to it due to lack of priority/need.
Out of necessity I ended up building my own when I was doing a lot of sensitometry but it wasn’t the easiest DIY project. At the time there wasn’t really anything available new besides the Tobias Wejex which was too expensive for me.
Nicholas Lindan
Advertiser
- Yugo: A sheet of cardboard, an enlarger and a kitchen clock;
- Chevrolet: Add a step tablet (only adds convenience);
- Lexus: A high resolution enlarging meter, an f-stop timer, a test strip printer that moves the paper (Durst made one) and an enlarger.
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OP
OP
That's accurate. I honestly don't like being incredibly detailed and regimented in my process, but the resulting haphazard nature can get me into trouble, sure enough. I'd like the option to be as scientific about things as I need to be, and to be able to do that when it actually matters; that approach will hopefully create a good framework for my less-regimented efforts, and maybe help create some actual art.
Very good to know. I like my StopClock because of exactly the same reason: I usually end up with two test strips, one test print, and then I'm into a rough working print. Often, I'm only a print or two away from a finished draft at that point; they're still complete garbage, but they're finished garbage... and that means something.
Fixed it for you.
Seriously, that's the first thing I thought of when I read your post. I was like "But Lexus isn't that swanky"... because a Lexus is just a Toyota that went to private school. But a Land Rover...yeah, that's the kind of over-engineered and feature-heavy "Why can't I get parts for this? It's only five years old!" analogy that we're looking for.
That being said: I do love a Yugo.
Nicholas Lindan
Advertiser
Oh dear, my soap box just trotted over, rubbed against my leg and whined for attention:
Over engineered Land Rovers ain't. Funny that people use the term to describe the terminally under-engineered.
An old saying is "An engineer can do for one dollar what any fool can do for ten." Anything that is expensive and unreliable never saw a competent engineer.
When it is reduced to it's necessary essence, no extra parts, no extra cost, just does it's job and doesn't break - then it is engineered. I'm not sure that there is such a thing as "over engineered." A bit like being "too healthy."
To continue with automobiles - for some strange reason Chrysler cars are (were?) considered by the hoi poloi to be "well engineered." A bracket for holding a relay is a good example of Chrysler engineering.
Chrysler bracket: Three bits of stamped and formed sheet metal, all held together with screws and bolted to a set of welded nuts on the fender liner.
Ford bracket: One bit of stamped and formed sheet metal, no screws, held in place with a self tapping screw.
GM bracket: No bracket. The plastic relay case snaps into a recess in the plastic fender liner.
The GM solutions oozes engineering hours. The Chrysler solution was thought up by a high-school drop-out.
An item that is really complicated, lots of machining and lots of parts is under engineered. Car and Driver magazine once took apart the ashtray in a Mercedes Benz because it wouldn't stay put. They counted it was made from 96 components. A Toyota ashtray, by comparison consists of one bakelite molding and a bit of bent spring steel to let it clip into place. Guess which one won't break, jam or fall out of the dash.
As to darkroom equipment:
I find well upholstered Camry's, er, low end Lexi, to be comfortable, reliable and reasonably priced. I'll take one over a Land Rover. If a Land Rover is forced on me I will sell it, buy a Lexus and use the money left over to buy a small sailboat.
Over engineered Land Rovers ain't. Funny that people use the term to describe the terminally under-engineered.
An old saying is "An engineer can do for one dollar what any fool can do for ten." Anything that is expensive and unreliable never saw a competent engineer.
When it is reduced to it's necessary essence, no extra parts, no extra cost, just does it's job and doesn't break - then it is engineered. I'm not sure that there is such a thing as "over engineered." A bit like being "too healthy."
To continue with automobiles - for some strange reason Chrysler cars are (were?) considered by the hoi poloi to be "well engineered." A bracket for holding a relay is a good example of Chrysler engineering.
Chrysler bracket: Three bits of stamped and formed sheet metal, all held together with screws and bolted to a set of welded nuts on the fender liner.
Ford bracket: One bit of stamped and formed sheet metal, no screws, held in place with a self tapping screw.
GM bracket: No bracket. The plastic relay case snaps into a recess in the plastic fender liner.
The GM solutions oozes engineering hours. The Chrysler solution was thought up by a high-school drop-out.
An item that is really complicated, lots of machining and lots of parts is under engineered. Car and Driver magazine once took apart the ashtray in a Mercedes Benz because it wouldn't stay put. They counted it was made from 96 components. A Toyota ashtray, by comparison consists of one bakelite molding and a bit of bent spring steel to let it clip into place. Guess which one won't break, jam or fall out of the dash.
As to darkroom equipment:
- Beseler digital timer: 23 integrated circuits.
- Darkroom Automation f-Stop timer: 1 integrated circuit
I find well upholstered Camry's, er, low end Lexi, to be comfortable, reliable and reasonably priced. I'll take one over a Land Rover. If a Land Rover is forced on me I will sell it, buy a Lexus and use the money left over to buy a small sailboat.
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I considered different things/designs but in the end went with a Kodak step tablet I had. What helped a lot was that I had access to radiometry equipment which allowed me to test/calibrate everything.
I've noticed the same thing. Compare the innards of a Contax versus Leica, for example. Leica is much simpler.
The most common reason old electronics fails is that electrolytic capacitors dry out after 30 or more years.
Thus, you can expect trouble from densitometers and any other electronics made back then.
If you don't know how to replace electrolytic capacitors, I suggest buying a new Printalyzer Densitometer.
Mark
Nicholas Lindan
Advertiser
The electrolytic problem dates to the ~1990's - manufacturers of consumer electronics started using cheap Chinese capacitors. Ten years later the world found out why they were so cheap.
Usually anything made after 2010 or before 1980 will have electrolytics with long lifetimes. That doesn't mean cheesy electrolytics weren't available in the 60's & 70's.
If you are going to re-cap the best replacements are probably 105C rated Panasonic/Matsushita capacitors. For the ultimate in lifetime use solid polymer electrolytic caps.
Also ICs with late 1970's date codes can be a problem: The black epoxy that housed the IC was porous and let in moisture; The epoxy was an emitter of alpha particles, causing memory bits to flip; Static protection wasn't in place and so weak partially blown MOS transistors were the norm; And 'purple plague' was endemic where a brittle purple gold/aluminum eutectic would form where tiny gold bond wires were cold-welded to the chip's aluminum pads.
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- RalphLambrecht
- Deleted
- Reason: Undesirable
OP
OP
And you will be better-off for having done so, my friend; much better off.
To address the other points from other posts: I'm not bad at replacing simple electronic widgets and fixing things that need to be fixed...but that's honestly more than I want to do unless it's necessary. Same goes for the mechanical bits; I can deal with doing so if I have to. I'd just rather not have to. I need to get a setup that works when needed, gives me solid data with a minimum of fuss, and otherwise avoids complicating my life.
This post has given me a chuckle or 2 and I appreciate that.
I also picked up a densitometer mainly so I could embark on a "rigorous" testing voyage. Alas, the ship is still at anchor. I do at least have a machine on hand so that I can add strict data to support or refute the subjective data my eyes provide.
The OP had me a bit scared regarding his "ad hoc and cavalier" processing. If your times are not consistent, sensitometry isn't going to help. We were likely not meant to take that statement literally.
Regarding Land Rovers, my sister and her husband had the small one that replaced the freelander (LR2)? and aside from marking it's territory with fluid droplets and having a ridiculously expensive receiver hitch assembly the thing was nearly faultless for them. Probably an anomaly.
I also picked up a densitometer mainly so I could embark on a "rigorous" testing voyage. Alas, the ship is still at anchor. I do at least have a machine on hand so that I can add strict data to support or refute the subjective data my eyes provide.
The OP had me a bit scared regarding his "ad hoc and cavalier" processing. If your times are not consistent, sensitometry isn't going to help. We were likely not meant to take that statement literally.
Regarding Land Rovers, my sister and her husband had the small one that replaced the freelander (LR2)? and aside from marking it's territory with fluid droplets and having a ridiculously expensive receiver hitch assembly the thing was nearly faultless for them. Probably an anomaly.
OP
OP
Same; many thanks to all that have contributed. The humor and sage advice has done me a world of good.
So, on that note...
... it's the subjectivity you just mentioned that I'm trying to move around within my process, and to which my statement alluded. I'm not trying to eliminate it, but simply stop relying on it absolutely; heretofore, subjective judgement is all I've had. I have solid and repeatable steps, but my analysis of them is non-existent past "Yep, that's good" or "My God, it's GARBAGE...IT'S ALL GARBAGE!! And it's completely okay to say that, but it would be nice to have a bit of objective context surrounding that assertion.
Definitely an anomaly. I've worked on Land Rovers; they are, in fact, quite terrible. I cannot even begin to tell you the number of times I would discover how that company designed and built something, only to say "You have to be kidding me" and no longer be surprised at the breakage.
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- RalphLambrecht
- Deleted
Hm. Yes, well, OK, but there's room for criticism here, I think. Your argument appears to be that the degree of complexity of the end product is indicative of the elegance or competence of the engineering effort as such, and also is predictive of reliability of the product. Overall, I can get behind that, but the example you give and that I quoted above is IMO a bit unfortunate by means of illustration of this principle. The reason is that the complexity of both devices is arguably high, and likely higher for the Darkroom Automation product than for the Beseler product. The key difference is that most of the complexity in the former case (the f-Stop timer) is hidden inside a (quasi) black box. In terms of the total number of transistors, the f-Stop timer is the more complex product. The engineering effort in this case is shifted to a different locus and did not occur at the OEM (Darkroom Automation, i.e. you), but happened deeply embedded into the supply chain. Also, the Beseler product I assume/suspect contains zero lines of software code, while the Darkroom Automation timer likely relies on hundreds to thousands of lines of code. While the locus of engineering did (I assume) lie within your organizational boundaries, from a physical perspective, this aspect of complexity is still embedded inside a black box.
The implicit assumptions behind your example are apparently that the complexity arising from VLSI (through the use of a microcontroller) is less risky and preferable to the complexity that arises from using several discrete components to achieve a similar function. This may to an extent be true if we assume that microcontroller manufacturers (i.e. the complex of designers and actual manufacturers) do a decent job, which is generally a pretty safe assumption - at least within the short-medium term. Long-term performance is always a bit more iffy to predict, as your examples re
lder semiconductors also illustrate. Evidently, such failure modes have been excluded from contemporary devices, but we don't (and cannot) know which possible failure modes we have received in return for these. Again, the implicit assumption is that the overall risk of failure is reduced. Either way, the fundamental truth in terms of complexity remains that both products are inherently fairly complex, but the DA/f-stop timer is a good example of what I like to call 'iceberg complexity', where most of the complexity is hidden from the OEM and the end user by being packaged inside a black box. That has benefits and drawbacks, and again, in general I agree that it's preferable in many ways to accept this iceberg nature of complexity. But what this means for the 'smartness' of the engineering effort involved is IMO a more nuanced story than what your seemingly straightforward comparison suggests.
So overall, I personally find the parallel that you create between the relay holders & ashtrays on the one hand (virtually purely mechanical compound parts) and darkroom timers on the other (inherently more complex devices from a perspective of technology domains involved) unfortunate and somewhat misleading. In addition to this, your comparison does not account for changes in engineering habits or fashions, which are evidently strongly influenced by availability of technologies. In other words, the Beseler implementation is representative for how the engineering problem would have been solved in the 1970s-1980s, while your implementation is more representative for how we have been doing things in the 1990s-2000s. In that sense, it's also a bit of an apples/oranges comparison.
I've actually tried asking about this before. Usually someone misunderstands the question and it goes off into the weeds. (Issue being that "densitometer" and "sensitometer" are similar words.)I don’t know anything about the dkonigs devices but you guys might suggest a similarly budget-friendly sensitometer next
The most "elegant and integrated" (and easy to find) ones are the X-Rite units, but they're really designed for X-Ray film and only have a blue/green light source. I've seen some reports that this is fine, but if you want appropriate nitpicking you'd probably prefer something closer to the "standard" illuminant used for film testing (probably something that approximates black body ~5500K, though other options are also okay).
This is also a product I probably should attempt to make, but one I haven't yet even experimented with. The issue is that I see the primary challenges as opto-mechanical, specifically producing a wide and extremely even light field for exposing the film, and I'm not sure I'm well equipped to produce such a thing. Any "lumpyness" in the illumination will become very apparent once you're nitpicking the results on a densitometer.
I'm also quite busy with other projects.
Understood. It’s not the simplest thing to make. I finally made one for myself but it’s not the most “elegant” of devices - I’m good at the lighting part but not the electronics part.
The only reason I mention it is exposure of film “tests” is usually where people go wrong.
a sensitometer can be replaced by photographing a Stouffer transmission step tablet. This will get you numerous equally spaced exposures onto a single frame.
That will introduce flare though.
Yeah, the differences in how one might approach any of these problems now-vs-then simply cannot be overstated.
Just looking at the innards of an X-Rite 810 densitometer, for example, there's a large and complex circuit board whose main function is to be a multiplexed amplifier and analog-to-digital converter for the photodiodes. Today all of this is integrated functionality of a light sensor whose entire footprint is only a few square millimeters. (and if you're not using such a sensor, its still either one or two extra ICs or an integrated peripheral of the microcontroller you're using to run the thing)
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