Hello. I am thinking of purchasing a glass negative carrier for my old, but trusty, Omega B-3 enlarger. I print both 35 and 6 x 6 negatives. My negatives tend to "pop", probably becaue I take so long to focus (my eyes are not what they used to be). I dread the thought of having to clean those extra surfaces. Has anyone used a carrier with just one piece of glass, I assume the top piece? I do use heat absorbing glass in my enlarger. Any suggestions are welcome. As always, thanks.

Francis

-- Francis T. Knapik (inirolem@aol.com), May 17, 2001

Answers

Francis, After the negative pops, as long as it stays warm, you can print it without a problem. Just refocus after it pops and stop down to say f11. You can use a glass carrier and with air and a anti static cloth, you won't have a problem either. Try the first suggestion before you go out and spend on a glass carrier. Cheers, Scott

-- Scott Walton (scotlynn@shore.net), May 17, 2001.

This may fall into useless answer catagory but did you ever wonder why your negs pop even though you have the heat absorbing glass? I did, so I measured negative surface temperature with and without the glass, then for different types of glass. What I found is that common heat absorbing glass cuts the temperature by about 50%. What it really does is slow the rate of rise, potentially making the problem worse. Other heat absorbing glass is vastly more effective and the negs don't pop at all. The problem is that I don't know of any reasonably priced sources of decent glass. I simply accumulated various pieces from junked optical equipment over the years, and put the best one in my enlarger. If anyone can expand on this, please do!

-- Conrad Hoffman (choffman@rpa.net), May 19, 2001.

I acquired a glass carrier for my Omega D-5 after struggling with certain hard-to-print negatives once too often. I do not use it for every negative, as the glassless is fine in most cases. However, when split filtering, and when using small apertures to buy time for dodging and burning, it really pays off to have the glass carrier.

It is good for the stability of the image, but it does introduce other problems. For example, in certain cases you can get Newton rings -- even though the carrier comes with "anti-Newton ring" glass. I am not smart enough to know why the Newton rings appeared, but they did come through on only one negative, so far.

Also, and rather obviously, you do get the additional surfaces for dust and dirt.

And finally, I have decided to cut masks for the 35mm and 6x6 negs that I use; I place the mask over the glass and position the film accordingly. The masks cut way down on the stray light, which just seems to be an invitation for fogging.

One very minor point that you should be aware of has to do with the design of the carrier for the "D" series, which might differ for the "B" series -- i.e., the pins to register the two halves together correctly are on the sides, where we would expect the film strips to run (east to west, if you follow me). As a result, I need to orient my film north-to-south to make use of the glass carrier.

Good luck with it!

--Sam

-- Sam (sselkind@home.com), May 20, 2001.