To date we''ve bought 3 Lambda Pro lasers.
Back in late 2003 I purchased a 150mw UG150 with analogue modulation. I purchased direct from the factory, and recieved it within 3-4 days. The first time I fired it up - i was highly impressed. Beam quality was great! Nice, tight TEM00 beam. Little bit of power fluctuation, but it settled after twenty minutes or so.
Then the next time I fired it up, I noticed that as the power ramped up the beam mode changed from TEM00 to god knows what. Wouldn't say TEM01, but some weird blob shape. I could repeat this manually - each time I approached 2/3 of full power (via fading within Pangolin) - it switched from "nice beam" to "shit beam".
I sent it back to LambdaPro, insisting that they pay shipping..... which they did. They said it was a 'coating' issue... I asked why they sent it out without testing it... no response to that one.
The laser I got back worked fine -we purchased another 150mw laser. Then I hired out the first laser with a projector... and the PSU blew up midshow (and took out the circuit breaker with it).
I opened the PSU - and was appalled at the build quality. Words cannot describe how shitly built the PSU was. We could not see what was wrong - but upon powering it up again i heard a bang and again our circuit breaker went out.
At this stage we contacted Lambda Pro again - hwoever they decided to ignore our requests for another warranty repair. After two weeks I got dave to write to them, asking them about prices and sales stuff. Long replied instantly.. so dave wrote back " hey while you're there, you better reply to my friend Adrian as he is getting pissed off". Liek magic, Long replied. He apologised for ignoring me, telling me it "gave me a bad heart feeling", and they didn't want to pay for shipping again, hence why they ignored it.
I sent it back to them, they said they could not replicate the issue. It apparently worked fine. I told them to replace the Switchmode PSU board anyway, coz I didn't want some half damaged PSU in my laser. Must have been a solder blob or something floating around in there....
About a year later we bought a UGA-300, 300mw laser. Out of the box, we noticed it was TEM01.... and power sometimes sat on 260mw, other times jumped up to 350mw. We didn't really mind the TEM01 beam, as it was being beam mixed with our Arctos Red diode laser, with shitful beam quality in itself.
However one thing that we noticed was that with analogue modulation at 5v, the maximum the laser output was around 170mw. Pull out the blanking plug, and it jumped to 350mw. So we sent this laser back to China to get recalibrated.
Our fist show with the RYG laser, the Green laser died half way through. Again - the PSU was dead. We sent it back to LambdaPro, and also got them to fix the TEM01 thing. I think they just sent us a whole new laser. But it has been okay so far.
Might I add, the new powersupplies appear much better built than the first. They still leave a little to be desired... but at least they are improving.
Another annoying 'feature' of all the lambdapros we own is that when the laser powers off (with mod at 0v), the laser flickers on and off a couple of times. It is rather dangerous, as usually the galvos fly around randomly for a fraction of a second as the rails drop... so this means that when you power off the laser you have to cover the aperture with your hand so it doesn't randomly shoot a single beam out into the crowd.....
We have since stopped buying Lambdapro. We cannot afford the bad reputation plus the lost income through our lasers dying all the time..... That being said, when the lambda's are not broken, they work well (apart from turnoff issue).
We haven't had a single problem with our two 150mw Lasercenturies....