I was looking for two new RGB projectors in the 5 - 6 Watt class with a bit more red than seemed to be on offer. A little searching on the forums and I was put in touch with Andreas Klement who was in the process of setting up a new company in Austria, Evil Lasers. What I found interesting was he was offering the Evil Kore 7 which was boasting 2.8W at 635nm, 2W 520nm and 2.8W 450nm. Altogether the sort of balance I was looking for. A few emails later and we'd made a deal.
I received the two units, extremely well packaged, about 4 days after they left Austria so no problems there. On the outside they looked extremely well made. I've only owned Chinese lasers up until now so that's all I have to compare with but we are talking £1000 per watt Chinese lasers. The Kore's are solid, with well fitting metalwork. Front and back panels milled from solid aluminium, stainless steel fasteners throughout and a very stiff stainless steel mounting bracket. Inside there are two compartments (yep this is becoming standard I know), power supplies in the well ventilated bottom and a sealed upper compartment housing the lasers and optics. You get a choice of scanners. I opted for the ScannerMax 506's
Opening up the interesting top section. As expected very solid. No bent bits of metal or hot melt glue just well machined micro adjustable mirror and dichro mounts and no laser modules! Unlike my Chinese lasers they don't use laser modules. Instead you can see and get at individual diodes and correction optics. I guess if you felt confident, it wouldn't be that difficult to replace a diode should it ever be needed. The same metalwork is used on the full range of lasers up to the 12W model. So mine had a few vacant spaces. Left to right in the attached picture 4 x 700mw Oclaro reds, two knife edged pairs combined by PBS cube. 2 x 1W Nichia greens, knife edged and 2 x Osram 1.4W blues, knife edged. Each pair of diodes sit at right angles in a mount which is sat on, what looks like, a standard 40mm peltier cooler. At the side of each sits the control electronics for the cooler. The front section of the diode mounts are milled to take the corrective optics which consists of a standard cylindrical telescope.
There's a USB connector on the back panel labelled 'Safety'. This is for tuning the scan fail detection to suit your requirements. The lasers come set up to comply with EN-60825. The software to do the tuning is only available in German at the moment but the English version hopefully won't be too long coming. Meanwhile until I brush up on my German I can't comment.
There's a couple of test patterns and a still from a show but I'm afraid none of my cameras do any justice to the deep colours including a pretty amazing yellow. I was told the 520nm cannot produce as good a yellow as 532nm but I can't agree. Maybe the extra red makes up for this.
The diodes used are all multi mode but the beam spec is within that claimed on their website. I measured 0.89mR over a 20Mtr range on all colours. The red showed some fringing due to the astigmatic beam, but that I expected.
Every unit comes with a test report showing the output at aperture for each colour plus the overall white power. Mine were within 1% of each other. Audience reaction on my first gig with them? "Brilliant". There's a link to a short video clip. The Kore's are left and right of centre.
Would I buy another? Yes.
Attachment 46807Attachment 46809Attachment 46808Attachment 46810Attachment 46811Attachment 46813Attachment 46814Attachment 46812
http://youtu.be/Lh2_WlyF7us
