LPL 7452 Enlarger
Large, Precise and Likable
What can one say about an enlarger that's a pleasure to use, looks great and has no vices. Well, there are a couple of minor niggles, but the only immediate problem you could have with this piece of equipment is how to lift and fit the boxes into your car after you've bought it.
Large the LPL 7452 certainly is... laborious to use it certainly isn't. This beast is one of the nicest enlargers I've ever used because of two features... (a) it has a perfectly counterbalanced head which can be raised or lowered by pressure from your little finger and (b) the fine-focus control with its "five-to-one" gearing is low enough to tweak the magnified image of grain in and out of focus a couple of times before settling on exact focus.
Construction
Although earlier models of the LPL 5 x 4 enlarger shared column design and size with the smaller 7700 series (which says much for the 7700's rigidity) the later 7451 and current 7452 models have a considerably stronger support with a 90 x 110mm extruded aluminium column bolted to a steel channel reinforced 25mm thick baseboard. Whilst the baseboard has ample dimensions at 600 x 600mm it has to be positioned 60mm from a wall in order to allow free movement of the head. This may cause problems in darkrooms which have standard 600mm deep worktops, as I had during the review period, because the enlarger's two front shock-absorbent feet are positioned too far forward... although a pre-assembly tweak with a drill and screwdriver could reposition them to your own needs. An alternative to this (and you would need a very solid, vibration-free darkroom wall) would be to use the proper wall-mounting brackets.
The stove enamelled matt-black enlarger head and its carriage are fabricated from cast aluminium and sheet steel. Like many enlargers nowadays the 7452 is "modular" and can be adapted to other uses and formats with accessories. You simply purchase what you need initially and add further bits and pieces as required.
Although the two previous models were available as plain "black-and-white" enlargers the 7452 is only supplied with a Colour or Variable Contrast module. Even if you are primarily a monochrome worker it is probably a good idea to purchase the Colour version... so utilising the yellow and magenta filters for your multigrade monochrome printing.
If you know that you will never want to do colour printing then the VCCE (Variable Contrast Constant Exposure) module is not only the cheaper option but the more user-friendly of the two. The VCCE's built-in filters are calibrated fo both Ilford Multigrade and Kodak Polycontrast enlarging papers so that prints can be made at any grade without having to recalculate basic exposure times (although recalculation does have to be made when using the hardest grades 4 to 5). A single knob is used to dial-in grades as fine as a quarter or less... exposures being kept constant by a compensating neutral density filter.
Hot News
Any 5 x 4 colour enlarger has to have a bright light source and mixing chamber in order to illuminate a large negative area evenly and to make enlarging times reasonably short. The 24v/250w ELC quartz-halogen lamp used here results in 1-stop of extra light output and some extra heat. Although the cooling system has been redesigned on the 7452 (the fan ducting has been modified to improve efficiency and the wiring circuit has been changed so that it is impossible to switch the light source on without the enlarger's fan being on) there is still a certain amount of heat generated and transmitted.
This heat transfer was so noticeable that I took measurements inside the negative stage to compare the rise and fall in temperature over a period of use that would be deemed normal but not excessive. After being switched-on for 30 secs the space where the negative would be had risen by only 0.5 degrees C... but after 5 minutes the temperature had gone up by 40 degrees C... enough to "pop" a negative in a glassless carrier. With the fan remaining on, but the enlarger lamp off, the probe took 20 mins to return to the ambient temperature of my darkroom.
This is perhaps not an unexpected result considering the wattage of the lamp but I think it means that the glass negative carrier should be specified when ordering the basic enlarger. Interestingly, the "popping" problem was encountered only with thin emulsion / base 35mm negatives. Both 120 roll and 5 x 4 inch sheet films didn't show any effects of the rise in temperature, no doubt due to their thicker support base. I realise that a 5 minute exposure can't be considered normal usage but if an accumulation of rapidly made exposures, in a multiple printing situation for example, started to approach 5 minutes I would be concerned about the negative.
Center Stage
Another 7452 modification has positioned the lamphouse unit 63mm further away from the enlarger's column. When making large 24 x 16 inch prints from full frame 35mm negatives the enlarger's head was at the top of the 1350mm column but my Beard masking easel, even with its 3 inch wide frame, was still 3 inches away from the column base. Using a 150mm Nikkor enlarging lens with a 5 x 4 negative for a slightly smaller print size had the same result... a 3 inch stand-off between easel and column.
Curiosity aroused. I went from two extremes to an average and fully projected a 6 x 7cm negative. Ah! The reason for the box-like extension became clear... it allowed a full 29 x 23 inch (74 x 58.5 cms... that's an odd size in metric too!) enlargement from ideal-format roll-film negatives.
Of course the down side to this handy provision is that standard 10 x 8 prints, which most of us make much of the time, need a 16 x 12 masking easel (certainly a Beard 2-blade easel which is a very popular item) to be positioned about 7 inches away from the column and 6 inches overlapping the front edge of the enlarger's baseboard. If the 7452's extension box was an optional extra I could understand its validity... but it came as part of the overall package so I chose to unbolt it... the last thing you want in a "dark" environment are annoying quirks and niggles with basic equipment.
Controls
In use the 7452 reminded me of a submarine. Schoolboy visits to these warships in Manchester Docks in the late 50s and early 60s were always a thrill... the gentle hum of machinery, lights glowing in the dimness, the sight of polished brass and the smell of cleaning rags, the smoothness of the periscope and its range-finder sights focusing... probably my chums waiting in the queue on shore!
Back in the darkroom this is what the LPL does well. Height elevation and locking is almost "power assisted" in feel whilst the coarse and fine-focus knobs, combined with the bright light from the quartz-halogen lamp, make accurate focus with any negative spot-on. In fact it's quite easy using a good grain magnifier to focus a negative with the enlarging lens at its optimum setting of 2-stops down... so avoiding the possibility of any potential focus shift when changing to the printing aperture.
The colour module incorporates stepless Yellow (0-200), Magenta (0-170) and Cyan (0-200) dichroic filters which are adjusted by large control knobs with adjacent dials giving clear backlit readings. The standard "white light" lever removes the filters from the light path without changing their settings - useful for clearer framing - and a switchable light attenuator is provided to cut the transmitted light by approximately 2-stops in case the image is so clear that exposure times become unmanagably short.
Monochrome
The optional Variable Contrast Constant Exposure module can be interchanged with the Colour module in seconds. Only one dial and scale is necessary in order to establish paper grades, or even quarters of a grade. The light attenuator also operates with this module and proved to be "in" more than it was "out" during the test period so bright was the enlarger!
Something I noticed with this enlarger (although it is more of a problem with lamps) was the time taken for the quartz-halogen's light to fully extinguish. Calculating that the afterglow lasted for about 0.25 sec the peak output would probably not be reached for 0.25 sec either. The effect becomes a problem when, for example, a 10 sec print exposure is judged to be right from the culmination of ten 1 sec test-strip exposures. It will of course be found that the test print will be overexposed because the correct exposure should have been in the region of 8 secs.
Summary...
All in all the LPL 7452 is one of the best enlargers of its type and one which I would have bought for myself had my darkroom not been fully equipped at the time. At a recommended retail price of around £1750 (+VAT) it is not cheap for an amateur... but you can find much better "street" prices from professional dealers such as Robert White Photographic in the UK, or from across the pond in America where LPL are marketed under the "Saunders" brand and where you will find excellent deals at B&H Photo Video in New York to reduce this figure considerably. Think of the LPL 7452 as a "once-in-a-lifetime" investment rather than a cost because it is both a quality enlarger and a wise purchase. And make sure you ask a friend to help load and unload it from your car... a large box weighing over 30 kilos is very awkward to handle by yourself!
7:29:44 PM 
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