Review.
I like him, I find it hard at times to tell how much he knows, but he's honest and helpful when asked a direct question, and often forthcoming with helpful technical points. He rarely takes more than a couple of days to respond to an email, unless it takes him research time to do so, or is very busy.
I bought five lasers over two years, all Lambdapro green DPSS.
Two UG 100 mW lasers, one I sold for nearly what I paid, wanting to raise money for a more powerful UGA, the other UG I kept, it's still strong, mostly stable for long periods, and the beam quality is stunning, 0.5 mm at aperture, TEM00, clean and round and even in the core of the beam, with divergence low, at 6.4 metres the beam is about 5 mm wide.
The UGA's are more mixed. One was really bad, and came back worse after sending back for modification to improve beam quality, which was very poor. It came back with a 5 mm wide blade, the thin axis was great, but that's not exactly the point. :twisted: The aperture was drilled wider to accomodate it, and the less said about the quality of that drilling, the better. So it went back permanently. Adrian was very patient during this, and helped a lot, refunding in full when we'd tried all we had patience for. I then bought a laser from a guy in the UK, who had bought a 200 mW UGA and was selling. It was cheaper by far, came originally from Adrian, and I asked the seller a lot of questions before buying it. I learned it had been used, but not much, flickered a little unstably at times, but the pictures of beam quality were good, so I bought it. It flickers a LOT more than it should, but does behave once heat equalises at around 25°C case temp after half an hour, and the beam quality is very good for a UGA, close to the UG quality. My most recent is a new 300 mW UGA, the beam isn't thin like the others (is a tad over 2 mm), but it is a very good beam, maybe a little more divergent, but is round and even in its core, and is very stable. Analog modulation works well too on it. It's still more than narrow enough for 5 mm mirrors and wide scan angles.
These lasers are sent by DHL from China, which is fine by me. Mine all arrived within four days of payment. That would be cool if it had come 50 miles by standard parcel post, let alone from China. And now they get sent for free, if bought via an eBay listing, at least. The packing is excellent, heavy card box with a custom cut foam support, additional bubblewrap lining for PSU, antistatic bag for laser head. That foam is very good, would be a good choice for various engineering needs, more than ideal for temporary packing.
Laser PSU quality has declined recently. They work well, but are hastily built. I recommend opening the case and carefully shaking it and brushing the board to remove any possible loose bits of solder. Take antistatic precautions to do this though. I found a bit of swarf in mine that would have killed the laser if it had been left to walk around in there. These are good lasers but I think they are in danger of trying to make too many, too fast. But I think they (Lambdapro) know this, and would probably be quick to replace and test a bit more for any customer who got one that failed this way. I guess they just don't want to spend more time than they must. They still seem to cut a LOT less corners than the makers of many other lasers I've seen on eBay. I think they set a fairly high minimum standard, and bar the odd weird abberation, they seem to stick to it. The only way we can get their lasers cheap is if they sell lots anyway...
Adrian sells other laser makes too, but I've not had the money to tempt me to try other yet, I've stuck to Lambdapro so far, as they've mostly been great.