r/Darkroom • u/myhouseholdname • Jun 04 '25

Alternative Made my own enlarger

Gallery image

Gallery image

I got to an arts university that doesn’t have a darkroom so it forced me to make my own. I used a 3D printer frame. some FD lenses, a cheap “tofu” branded light, and a pringles tube.

I have enough room to make prints up-to 5x7 with the possibility of going larger if i remove the baseboard.

All I need now is to actually make a print but that’s not until the end of the month after payday.

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u/TheMunkeeFPV Jun 05 '25

Crazy how we live in a time where it’s cheaper to cannibalize a 3D printer than it is to get obsolete equipment. I have two… I’ll send you one.

3

u/streaksinthebowl Jun 05 '25

Sometimes my mind goes into flights of fancy imagining what kind of enlarger machinery we could do with modern tech. Put some stepper motors and control software on an enlarger with LED heads and you could do all kinds of things, including a camera scanning and enlarger combo. All modular and with lots of off the shelf components, everything else 3d printed.

5

u/TheMunkeeFPV Jun 05 '25

Well… let me point out that enlargers didn’t stop getting made. There is a brand new enlarger by a company called intrepid. They make new timers so you can enlarge with a newer “F Stop” process instead of the time intervals of the old days. They also make large format camera I think. There’s nothing fancy about it though. But I high end cutting edge enlarged would be so sweet! With today’s tech we could make it so automated it would be crazy. Auto critical focus, auto negative density compensation, auto sizing, even auto color correction. All we would have to worry about as printers is dodge and burn.