Meopta is a Czech company that manufactured a variety of enlargers over the years. There were surprisingly popular in the West despite being an Iron- curtain country for most of their production life. Era: It's nearly impossible to get actual production year spans; I've provided this simply to give an idea of when an enlarger was in production. Column: all columns are assumed to be vertical unless oblique is noted. On smaller enlargers this wouldn't be a problem, but at larger magnifications (and with lenses with shorter focal lengths), this can become a concern. The following unsigned review appeared in Modern Photography magazine, January 1. Specifications: Meopta Opemus lla enlarger. Construction: all metal, single post. Negative Size: 3. Lens: 5. 0mm f/4. Belar and 7. 5mm f/4. Belar. Focusing: manual rack and pinion with focusing bellows. LIGHT SOURCE: 1. 50- watt No. OPTICAL SYSTEM: double condenser. Year of production: 1. Enlarging apparatus for. The darkroom I run is full of Meopta enlargers – they are a fairly standard piece of college. Manual Meopta Opemus 6. Other Features: adjustable glass negative carrier with rangefinder focusing, filter drawer, 1. Price: $1. 09. 9. Few are the photographers who can steal the space required for a large darkroom - and it doesn't matter if they live in an apartment or a house of their own. The Meopta Opemus lla may have well been designed for the tight little darkroom. And if you need something larger, you simply swivel the head 9. For apartment dwellers it can be disassembled in minutes by unlocking two large knobs- -one each at the baseboard and lamp housing assembly. Handleiding vergroter Opemus 4. The Meopta is a small but precision machine. The rack- and- pinion system for both the lamphouse and the bellows focusing system works smoothly. More important for the color printer, there's hardly a light leak from its dark red glass encased lamp housing. We spent several long printing sessions with the Meopta and can report that its heat dissipating system (convection) really works. The machine never gets too hot to touch comfortably. One of the really big features for the man in a hurry is its rangefinder focusing system, which is actually part of the adjustable negative carrier (more about that later). Pull the carrier part way out, and two lines are projected on the easel.
Line up the two lines by rotating the bellows control knob and the negative is properly focused. We have always been exponents of various optical critical focusing devices, but we could discern no difference in sharpness with prints made using a separate focuser or the rangefinder to determine sharpness. And the range- finder was a whole lot faster to use. The glass negative carrier has four controls that are used to position movable borders. You can drop or mask (for 3. At f/5. 6 this fall- off became barely discernible and at f/8, totally nonexistent. Over- all print quality at f/8 was as good as you could ask from the machine. The same condensers are used for the 7. This device is substituted for the regular lens mount- -used for correcting unwanted converging lines- -in building shots, for instance. It consists of a ring that can be angled to about 2. You also tilt the enlarger head or baseboard to retain over- all sharpness. It works, but you settle for smaller than 1. The full 3. 5mm negative cannot be printed with the 5. You must use a 7. In general, the Meopta proved to be a sensibly designed, well engineered machine. The following unsigned reviews appeared in Modern Photography magazine, March 1. It's been edited slightly for brevity. Specifications: Opemus 5 enlarger, accepts negatives to 2 . Other Features: Red filter, filter drawer. Price: $1. 79. Specifications: Meopta Meochrom color head, CCO- 1. MP5 lamp, 1. 2- volt power supply adjustable to 1. Price: Color head: $2. Opemus 5 enlarger with color head: $3. Meopta enlargers are, and always have been for as long as we can remember, machines designed to offer a lot of performance for relatively little money. Traditionally, they have been rugged, well- designed units that made up in toughness what they may have lacked in finesse. And they were always extremely simple machines. It was just that their versatility was added on. With an extensive line of accessories you could convert plain vanilla into a veritable banana split, with add- on copying devices, film magazines, copying lights, even foot switches and timers for the lights as well as extension tubes and a sheet film back with sheet film holders. You might start with the basic package, but if you ever wanted the whole works, conversion was easy, fast and relatively inexpensive. The latest in a long line of Meopta products, some predating World War II, is the new Opemus 5. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Meopta will never give up some things, nor should they, and the model 5, like all previous models, sports that highly chromed upright, slanted forward at a rakish angle and calibrated from 0- 5. In case you haven't noticed, wooden baseboards are rather hard to come by these days due to the high cost of lumber. Most manufacturers have gone to a compressed fiber product which, inch for inch, is less rigid than wood- -so the Opemus 5 baseboard is a plus any way you look at it. The upright is held to the baseboard by a heavy casting that uses two screws to hold the upright in place. More about these and their problems later. The basic enlarger chassis consists of two castings; one rides the upright, the second keys into the first. The second casting also holds the focusing mechanism, bellows and accepts the negative carrier and either a regular or a color head. But no matter which head is used, the basic method of achieving even illumination is by means of double condensers. Let's start by fitting the standard lamphouse to the chassis by means of two knurled screws, and plugging the head into a timer. Now let's remove the negative carrier and insert a negative. No simple carrier this. It comes equipped with glass inserts, which we quickly removed and replaced with 3. The glassless inserts slide easily into place and are cut out along the sprocket area of the film so frame numbers may be easily read. A pair of pins can be either pulled forward to allow easy, accurate positioning of 3. The carrier also has built- in adjustable masks. This allows the image to be masked down to cover the precise area to be printed, reducing internal flare within the enlarger that degrades print quality. At the extreme rear of the carrier is a . Adjust focus until the two lines become one line, and shift the carrier so that the negative is in place and, lo and behold, it's sharp as a needle. This feature works well, but we still did all the tests by manually focusing the image itself on the baseboard. We rate the carrier fairly high on versatility and ease of use. One annoying detail, however: One mask was adjusted rather loosely and would slip closed as we placed the carrier in the enlarger. It was easily readjusted, of course. Now that we have a negative in place, let's make a print. The height of the head is controlled by a friction drive at the right side of the upright. It is not counterbalanced, so a bit more effort is needed than one might anticipate. Four screws control the tension, and the first instinct is to loosen the screws to allow freer movement. Resist this temptation at all costs- -loosening the screws will only cause the entire unit to slip until the screws are properly readjusted. Now let's move the lamphouse to the top of the upright and focus the image for maximum sharpness. Using a 5. 0mm lens on the 3. Well there's a simple answer. You placed the upright too low in the baseboard bracket during assembly. Raise it as high as you can and tighten the screws as tight as you can. Well, almost no problem. Combine the slippery chrome finish with the small area that the baseboard bracket grips and you'll find the upright slowly slides down through the bracket until it sits on the baseboard and you are back where you started. The solution to this dilemma is simple. Not pretty, but simple. We fitted a C- clamp to help those two little screws to hold the upright in the high position. Now 1. 1 x 1. 4s on the baseboard are no problem. Focusing is also accomplished without a hitch. The friction drive on the right side is smooth, simple and without any slip or play. To change lenses you just loosen a retaining screw and remove the circular lensboard. A flat board is supplied for 8. All you need do is to make a few prints to realize that this is a fast and efficient machine. Exposures from our standard negative ran about 1. Evenness of illumination with the condenser head showed that illumination corner to corner was near perfect, with less than Ve stop variation. The illumination from center to corner was less impressive with just over a 1/8 stop error. This figure was obtained using a 5. When we switched to 2. We believe that fact that no supplementary condensers are used to optimize light distribution accounts for the falloff at the edges. The double condensers may well be designed to a compromise point in the hope that it will serve both 3. However longitudinal alignment showed a 3/4 bubble length error, which was easily corrected by shimming up the baseboard casting 1 mm or so. Now let's take a close look at the color head. To install it, remove the two retaining screws, lift off the standard head, drop the color head in place, replace the screws and that's it. Once the color head is plugged into its power supply, you're ready to go. We inserted a standard negative and proceeded to make prints using Ektacolor type 7. RC paper and 3. 00 chemistry. A Beseler PM2. M analyzer was used to quickly arrive at the proper filtration, and the first 1. Color saturation was good and the overall clarity of the image told us that both UV and IR filtration were effective. The color head is easy to use since it's marked in 5. CC increments from 0- 1. The only source of inconvenience was the lack of a white light capability. This means that you either must focus with a filter value in place or crank all three dials to zero to get maximum brightness on the easel.
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