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May/June 2000

For the past two months I’ve been using two extraordinarily well built Kaiser enlargers. Made in Germany, Kaiser enlargers are now being imported into the USA by HP Marketing. Everything on them is modular and interchangeable, so exact configurations can’t be identified by model number or name. I used two—one a manual-focus head with dichroic light source for color (or black-and-white), and the other an autofocus head with the variable-contrast (VC) black-and-white light source.

The European tradition
Kaiser enlargers are very much in the European tradition. Each is supremely well engineered and constructed to the highest standards. They are the most solid, vibration-free enlargers, with the smoothest-working controls, that I’ve ever used. Their design is similar to that of Durst enlargers—they’re vertical-column enlargers with reflex light paths. In fact, these look like descendants of the Durst M601—right down to a negative carrier that has four masking blades and takes either glass or glassless metal inserts. I’ve always liked Durst negative carriers, and I liked the Kaiser carriers too, because one is all you need—the same carrier takes all sizes up to 6x9cm and can be configured to your taste.

Like the Durst carriers, the Kaiser carrier has four independently adjustable masking blades to block out extraneous light. However, the masking blades aren’t quite wide enough to block all the extraneous light when enlarging 35mm. I had a choice of allowing a band of white light to shine through at the outer edge of the carrier or next to the negative. I couldn’t block both. The carriers I used had glass inserts in both the upper and lower parts (anti-Newton ring glass for the upper), but Kaiser also makes flat metal inserts for any size negative. I prefer using the metal inserts since it isn’t easy to keep four sides of glass dust-free. You also can easily configure the Kaiser carrier as a “half-glass” carrier, with glass on top and a metal insert on the bottom.

The carrier doesn’t have to be removed from the enlarger to put a new negative in, either. While still seated snugly in the lamphouse, the hinged upper part of the carrier opens slightly and locks up to make inserting and removing negatives easier. The carrier has adjustable stops that act as guides for positioning a strip of negatives. It’s a problem to center a single negative using any all-glass carrier, but with the Kaiser carrier a strip of several frames is easy to center even without removing the carrier from the enlarger.

St. Paul, 1998. You can produce an extra-wide border to include some of the sprocket holes.

I printed from 2 1/4 square negatives made with a Rollei TLR, a Mamiya 6, and a Hasselblad. The negative carrier let me show the frame edge only when enlarging the Hasselblad negative. The negative carrier measures 55mm across, enough for the 54mm width of Hasselblad negatives but not enough for the 56mm width of the Rollei and Mamiya negatives. This is only a concern if you enlarge the whole negative and a small amount of the clear frame edge beyond the image to show a thin black line around the negative (or to show the characteristic Hasselblad notches, in case you want to let the world know that you shoot with a Hasselblad). There is no such problem with 35mm negatives. The masking blades work very well if you prefer to show the thin black line around a 35mm image.

The projected image
The column is straight, not inclined as it is on several Omega and Beseler models. A straight column is solid and vibration-free, and it means you don’t have to move your easel when raising or lowering the lamphouse, but it does impose limits on how large a print you can make. Depending on the size of the negative you’re enlarging and the focal length of the lens used, the enlarged image runs into the base of the column at a certain point. With a 50mm lens, I could enlarge a 35mm negative up to 14 1/4 x 21 1/8 on the baseboard without an easel; using an easel reduces that by some small amount (exactly how much depends on the design of your easel). With an 80mm lens, I was able to enlarge a 56mm wide Mamiya 6 negative up to 17 5/8 x 17 5/8, again without an easel on the baseboard. This presented a problem, because I normally print to 16x20 and 20x24. To overcome this limitation, Kaiser makes an extended-length column as well as an extender that mounts between the enlarger head and the column. Both would be necessary to make larger prints. Since I didn’t use them, I don’t know how large a projected image would be possible with the extenders in place. However, with my Beseler 23CIII XL and a 50mm lens, I can make full-frame prints from 35mm negatives on 20x24 paper.

Focusing is smooth and positive, with no backlash, using the manual focus head. A smaller fine-focus knob in the middle of the main focus knob was a real pleasure to use. Using a grain focuser, I was not only able to focus precisely on the grain, but I could use the fine focus knob to focus on the front or back layers of the emulsion! I hadn’t experienced that degree of focusing precision before. I checked all four corners of the image with a grain focuser and found them to be exactly in focus alignment with the center of the image, proof of perfect factory alignment of the negative carrier, lens stage, and baseboard. I used the dichroic filters to enlarge VC paper with excellent results— very similar to my experience with dichroic heads on Omega and Beseler enlargers

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