laser prices

[badger1666]

now all the laser manufactuers have had a smack in the face with the arrival of cheap blue 445nm
does this mean the prices of 642nm and 532nm are going to go to compensate ?

bloody hope not

[allthatwhichis]

now all the laser manufactuers have had a smack in the face with the arrival of cheap blue 445nm
does this mean the prices of 642nm and 532nm are going to go to compensate ?

bloody hope not

We need to talk Casio into using 642nm diodes for red.

[badger1666]

i sure somwhere there's a manu working on somthing to rival casio and lets hope they are doing just that, using 642nm
well i hope so

[mccarrot]

now all the laser manufactuers have had a smack in the face with the arrival of cheap blue 445nm
does this mean the prices of 642nm and 532nm are going to go to compensate ?

bloody hope not

So what are the beam specs of your cheap blue.

there is a big chance the cheap blue isn't that cheap anymore after you are finished shaping the beam.

Maybe the cheap 635nm red will be an option to match the bad divergence of the cheap blue.

[norty303]

The blue is cheap.... throw away 50% and use a beam shaper to get what you need. Cheaper to add another diode than to buy fancy optics.

[FourDee]

You can't alter divergence by just 'throwing a piece of the beam away' ...

[badger1666]

yeah but surely if the far field beam for example was 4mm x 20 mm and you cut it in half its now 4mm x 10mm granted the divergence dont change but the beam size does

@ mc carrot i could spend £400 on optics to fix the beam so it usable £30 on a diode and only end up 250mw from that 500mw diode its still cheap compared to anything else out there

You can't alter divergence by just 'throwing a piece of the beam away' ...

[taggalucci]

You can't alter divergence by just 'throwing a piece of the beam away' ...

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what is being proposed is the following... By collimating a beam to acheive a desirable divergence you may as a direct result increase the diameter of the beam. By masking with an iris, aperture or reflecting only a portion of the beam off your scanners, you would maintain this desirable divergence. You would just "throw a piece of the beam away".

[krazer]

A note-
With a large emitter such as this laser, it is entirely possible to pass the beam through an aperture to 'clean up' the beam. This is NOT possible with a singlemode diodes, since the beam is already as good as it gets--you can pass the beam though a pinhole to make it more round/less noisy, but the improvement on the divergence is minimal.

The extreme case of loosing light from the 445nm diode would be sending it through a pinhole that is sized to be diffraction limited (roughly (wavelength*focal length)/(pi*radius incoming beam)-which would only let the light that fits a gaussian profile due to some linear combination of wavefronts blah blah)--and give you a more or less diffraction limited beam. Of course in that case you won't get much power through, but you can go for a slightly less extreme case where you cut off perhaps 1/2 of the beam, which should give you a decent improvement in beam profile.

[mccarrot]

But blocking 1/2 the beam is blocking 250mW, this is tranfered into heat. your collimator wil get hot very fast!