Anyone else have problems getting dark results from a Vivitar slide printer? Adjusting the lightness/darkness, playing with the color filters, nothing seems to make them brighter. The printer's just ove a year old, and has been used some, but not a lot. Has anyone else had this problem, and if so, how did you deal with it?

-- Kris Anderson (kmanderson35@hotmail.com), March 18, 2004

Answers

in my (admittedly limited) experience with the vivitar, i have discovered a few causes/solutions for your problem: 1. if you don't have an ac adapter, change your batteries after each pack of 10 polaroids (even if you don't think you should). 2. slightly overexpose your slides. 3. allow a little more time before peeling your polaroid (which also causes some color shift if you let it go too long...). 4. (and i don't mean to insult your intelligence with this one) the longer exposure lines (above normal) create lighter prints. all of this information was gathered by my own empirical results-as i have no instruction manual or experienced peers to advise me- using polaroid 669 pack film, and 35mm slides created with kodak e100g. i also feel the need to add that polaroid film has a natural tendancy to block up in dark areas. i have noticed that the stop ratio of polaroid films as compared to color slide films is much lower. please feel free to e-mail me with any further questions or comments regarding the slide printer. also, i am curious- are you doing lifts or transfers, or merely creating prints from slides? (or perhaps a technique of your own devising...) also, what are your results (other than an unfortunate darness) do you get from color filters? ~m

-- marianne (marilu0@earthlink.net), April 12, 2004.