Opinions sought... Hybrid Whitelight vs Solid state RGB

Hi guys,

We are at the point where the next big component we buy will allow us to do full colour shows....

However we have to ways we can go about this...

One is to purchase a PCAOM to allow us to use our argon with our 600mw arctos diode red... Our argon does around 3 - 4 watts, we are thinking of dumping the 488nm and most of 514nm and instead using its 200mw of 457nm and 400 - 500mw of 476nm in the colour palette... (and then as a result the massive amounts of waste beam could go off to feed fibre heads or a twin head laser...)

The other option is to purchase a blue dpss laser, and do it the lighter, less power hungry way...

However our main point of contention with the latter is the high cost and relatively immature technology surrounding delivering lots of power at 473nm or 457nm....

Splitting up the pros and cons of each.. the benefit of doing the former is that we get lots of power and more than one wavelength of blue, for the cost of a PCAOM - figure around the 1.5K to 2.5K mark.

The cons of this method are that the argon will be sucking about 20 amps from a 230v circuit, and requires water cooling.

To get 600mw of blue, from a DPSS, will require we spend over 5 grand euro, for anything half reliable. However it will be lighter, more effecient, and smaller.

What would you guys do in our posiiton ?

Cheers,

adrian

I have to go the hybrid method due to cost.
Of course, solid state is the way of the future, I guess the questions become is the blue dpss technology stable enough?, and costs will certainly go down over time as well as the technolgy becomes more mature. So I would combine with the argon for now, deal with the pwr requirements, weight, watercooling, and wait for the price/performance of blue dpss laser becomes better. But then again, somebody has push the envelope.

I plan to combine my air cooled singlephase 650mw argon with two 200mw red diodes combined from maXYZ. Unfortunaly my PCAOM will be in use with my whitelight so I have to split the green/blue from the argon and modulate with AOM, then recombine, then combine with the combined red diodes. Talk about needing stabilty!

I would eventually like to upgrade to an arctos 450 or 650mw red to combine with my 650mw argon, should give a nice color balance. How are you satisfied with your arctos?

Our arctos is officially a 450mw model, labelled as 540mw, doing 590mw...

They began using new diodes with 25% more power, for the same price, last year. I don't know if they've since changed their price list to reflect hte greater powers (and hence charge higher prices) since we've purchased....

Two things - listen to arctos when they say 'mount your laser to a big heatsink, the same size as the laser or bigger'. And make sure that the baseplate you mount it to is flat. Not doing either of the above will lead to misalignment issues, which we've experienced. We'v'e had to pop the top off and realign the mirrors a couple times....

I daresay this is directly caused by us not cooling it enough (it gets pretty damn warm) and also a problem that we only discovered after the fact - our nice 10mm thick baseplate was warped.. only slightly...

Other than that - i'd say the arctos is well built, beam is pretty large.... maybe 3 - 4mm... barely fits on our widemove mirrors... and i don't know if its really only 0.7mrad divergent. Thats okay though - our argon is very divergent and wev'e mixed the beams before - a pretty good match they are.

Arctos are very friendly, always responsive to emails, and willing to work with the customer to keep them happy, plus Mrs.Hafner has a hot sounding accent... What more do you want ;)

Back to blue, one thing we don't want is problems. We've had lots of problems with green lasers from chinese companies, and I don't want to experience the same problems with blues... from PSU's blowing up to shitful coatings on crystals to massive power drops to TEM01 beams when we should have TEM00 to lack of after sales service to uncalibrated PSUs .... i can keep going...

;)

Something else to consider is the blanking frequency limit. Using a PCAOM and the argon, you're basically unlimited. But blanking a DPSS blue could cause problems. (I know that *lots* of the cheaper chinese DPSS green lasers suffer from power loss at higher blanking speeds, and most of the units seem to top out at around 10Khz - even the ones that support analog blanking...) So assuming that the blue DPSS units have the same issues, that could be a problem for you.

The way you explain it, it seems that the PCAOM would be the quick and dirty solution for now. You can always put the PCAOM to work in another projector later (or sell it outright) once blue DPSS technology has matured a bit. I suppose it really boils down to how sick and tired you are with setting up the water cooling for that Argon each and every time...

Good point. I'm tending to agree with you more and more.....

Water cooling is a tad annoying, but its just one of the tradeoffs....

Hi aijii,

Perhaps you might do us all a favour and post some seller reviews on which Chinese companies and laser models along with defects gave you grief.

I have a Lambda Pro 532 200 mW that has never given me any problems other than having to install an external IR filter to correct interference problems with my Catweazle LCII projector galvo head.

Is the beam from your Arctos red polarised to allow operation with a PCAOM ?

I would love to got full solid state myself for the sake of portability and power efficiency.
Large frame, water cooled , power hungry lasers are great for permanent venues but a pain to lug around and setup, align, etc...

Rick

Rick,

Seller review done! I need to post pics of the poopy PSU's....
I should also do one of the arctos red... just need some time thats all...

Cheers,

Adrian

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LaserLover

Hi aijii,

Is the beam from your Arctos red polarised to allow operation with a PCAOM ?

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Yes and no.

Yes in the fact that all the individual beams being used are polarized. Assuming "standard" diodes, should be about 100:1

No because the PBS cube in the latter combining stages overlaps as many of the P and S type beams as physically possible.

If im not mistaken doesnt an AOM require specific polarity AOI's ? If so, an Arctos in any form would be impossible to use.

Correct Spec.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LaserLover

Hi aijii,
Is the beam from your Arctos red polarised to allow operation with a PCAOM ?
Rick

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You don't need to modulate it with the PCAOM - you just do the combining post PCAOM.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by aijii

The cons of this method are that the argon will be sucking about 20 amps from a 230v circuit, and requires water cooling
adrian

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Hey Adrian -

Did you ever see this post http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums/...7&postcount=18
(Mr. Dave, there, commented on it, perhaps you guys did discuss?)

Lemme know - gonna be cleaning out the shop n a few more weeks, one thing we are gonna look to unload is the complete GUTS of one of these, all in perfect working order, you could piggy-pack off your 220V distro for your 909, and it should keep 'er cool all night for ya...

I'd definitely stick with your 909/arctos idea till the higher-power dpss blues 'ripen' a bit... better/faster color control with your AO, and practically no worries - what is more of a 'hassle' - luggin a few heavy cables/cases (which the chicks dig seein' anyway! :D ) or watching helplessly as your blue takes a shyte before your very eyes, on a gig, right? We aren't going high-power (>5W / 15W) full color till we can afford to have 3 of everything, and at least 2 at any one given gig - and that's a LOT of coin!!! :rolleyes:

Ya know, diodes are not the ONLY point of failure - electronics - though unlikely, they CAN take a shoo-shoo - what happens when a TE-control circuit goes or if a surge takes out a critical SYSTEM control on a gig?...Ion back-ups are frequently little more than a phone-call and a couple grand x-rental-later away...:cool:

Anyhoo, just 'mis dos centavos' ;) - lemme know if you guys MIGHT be interested in the 1461 'guts' before summer - PS, also will come with 'plans'/drawings for a 'chassis' to build for it... not too hard...

peace..

-J