Wallner Automatic S ... what does it do? how does it work?

[maarten m]

hello,

with the equipment that we gathered for our Darkroom, came this piece:


we have no idea what it is supposed to do or how it works.
i guess some kind of darkroom light meter?
anybody out there that can help us here?

regard,
maarten.

[John Koehrer]

It appears to be an exposure device/timing for enlarging. Ilford and others made similar things without the timing feature and remote probe.
The gadget requires you to make a good print to determine the sensitivity. Take a reference reading from highlight/shadow area(can't remember). Then when you put another neg in place, you meter the same sort of area and the time is apparently determined by your test print, so with this thing push the button and you're off to the races.

The switch on the upper light turns the lamp on to compose/focus and s/l is a mystery to me. Thimking about it. S may be used to determine the sensitivity and L the aperture?

[MattKing]

"s" for safelight, "l" for lamp?

[Bill Burk]

I guess it is for automatically enlarging many prints from different negatives.

Looks like you would put the sensor near the easel pointing at the middle of the sheet of paper as it gets exposed.

With no way to set the time it probably makes an average gray print of everything, automatically adjusting for over/underexposed negs, changes in aperture and enlarger height. But always gray and never telling you how much time it used.

[maarten m]

hey guys, thanks for your thoughts on the subject, now i know where to start.
i'll check it out when i get to the darkroom tonight ...

regards,
mm

[John Koehrer]

Another SWAG here, but could it provide an auto exposure by the amount of light hitting the sensor during exposure?

[maarten m]

yep john, that's what i gathered from this and my other thread about this thing.
i'll give it a try, as soon as our darkroom is operational ...

mm