New

I’ve never been one for new. With technology in particular. So I surprised myself a little bit when I decided to back this Kickstarter campaign.

It’s a great idea - making darkroom printing more accessible and continuing the analog photography renaissance. A small enlarger head that hooks onto a tripod, and an LED powered control unit that has a timer, contrast filters, and a safe light built in! What’s not to love? No bulbs to replace, no extra timer unit, no fiddling with contrast filters in the dark, and no extra safe light needed. And it would work across the world - presumably without the need for a transformer to deal with the 220 vs 110 volt issue. I waited for days for the campaign to kick off and signed on a few minutes ahead of time to snag a possible early bird special. (Of course, I stepped away to chop salad with 15 minutes to go and when I returned - still before the official kick-off time, mind you - all the early bird specials were already gone). It was a saving of over $100, so it was with some resentment that I still went ahead and backed the project.

And so the waiting began. Even though Intrepid Camera has already done a lot of prototyping and development, it would still be 5-6 months before they expected the units to ship. The initial reviews started to come out from prototype testers on YouTube. Commenters started commenting. Things started to get interesting.

While no one said anything negative about the project overall, established darkroom practitioners said they would still prefer to use a traditional enlarger if they had the space available. There were some concerns about the light source not covering the entire medium format negative (it’s since been addressed by Intrepid), about the possibility of a little less contrast from the LED light source compared to traditional filters, about having to fiddle with the alignment of the enlarger each time etc. It wasn’t the glowing positive review I expected, and this gave me pause. Maybe I should explore the traditional route too, I thought.

Long story short, thanks to Craigslist, I went and picked this up yesterday.

I guess I’m not one for new after all. A quote I recently heard in this podcast comes to mind.

When you ask God a question and he answers it, you hang up the phone.