Laser goggles, £5!

[robotarmy]

Hey ppl, i saw these on ebay and thought some of you might be interested. I've picked up 4 pairs and i'll let you know how they work out, post some test pics etc

Laser goggles for £5? I think so! Not sold as such, but tested by someone sometime.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...m=360210200410
http://www.musicfoxaudio.com/lasers/...ison_guide.htm

(i'm not the seller, just thought it was a good find)

[dar303]

I'll buy one as soon as I get a shipping quote to Sweden and test it with a photo spectrometer to see the wavelenght(s) it protects from.
If they not run out first that is...
If you want it tested just buy one more (if you are inside UK) and send it to me and I'll paypal you for it + postage and i'll test it.

[robotarmy]

Hmmm, good idea!

I got 4 so I'll send you one of the ones i bought, i knew i got extra for a reason

If he won't ship to sweden let me know and i'll buy however many you want and ship 'em to you no problem

[stanwax]

These are the same as used to be sold by a scottish seller called Babcock disposals. I and quite a few people I know have these, they are good for green for sure - will let a lot of red through and cant remember what they are like for blue...
One cool thing you can do with them is to observe flourecence from a green laser. Normally the green light is way to strong to allow you to see this effect but the green is attenuated enough that you will see lots of things light up yellow. Its pretty cool!
I recently saw someone in a TV show with a pair of these goggles on - Cant remember what it was but it was some sort of drama and they were used as a prop.
Well worth the fiver - though there will be no OD spec provided with them so be careful . Remember laser googles are not a replacement for common sense and good pratice.
Rob

[robotarmy]

Yeah, for sure about the lack of OD spec, they could also have minor scratches in the coating so test them off your head before you go pointing the beam at your face

dar303's spectrometer reports should let us know if they're good for any other colour than 532... I'm personally interested in their use with an ALC68 argon, so hopefully they block enough of the blue line to be safe-ish. I know the optics on my beam table right now are so shit that the reflections leave stars in my eyes at 4A of tube current, so i really hope these help.

[dar303]

They replied really fast so I ordered one right away. I'm not sure I'll be able to test it before the holidays since i'm going away until after new year but I'll post the results as soon as I have the time to do the test.

[robotarmy]

I think we should buy 'em all, flog 'em on if they're any good... don't want to let this kind of deal go to waste, the guy obviously doesn't know what he's selling (or he does, and they're crap, and i'm wasting all your time lol)

[dar303]

Thanks for the tip anyway, it will be interesting to see the results!
Anyone have a theory to what they were used for in the military? The laser rangefinders for guns/tanks are usually over the visible spectrum, right?

[dar303]

Here is the plot from my Cary photospectrometer:



The goggles have very good damping from about 540nm and downwards, green, blue and UV it is then. My deuterium lamp is broken so I could only plot reliably down to 350nm but the damping was about the same.
Me and the photospectrometer software arn't really friends so I couldn't reference the scale to any known unit (i chose "Absolut value") but it makes a straight line at 0 with no sample in it. The damping on the "active" wavelenghts for these goggles are however much better that a pair of "real" whitelight glasses I own.

These glasses compared to cheap "whitelight" glasses:

Either these 5GBP ones are really good or the whitelights are really bad. I didnt change anything in the setup, just exchanged the goggles and made another plot. I really need to get a known OD-rated quality pair and compare. Anybody have any tips or have some to sell?
(I managed to fuck up the last image somewhat, had to take a screendump on my win 98 comp, transfer to diskette and then change computer and transfer to USB stick...)

[tocket]

I don't know what absolute value means in this case. See if you can use absorbance instead. It's possible that this is simply absorbance with the sign reversed. Absorbance is calculated as -log10(I/I0), which is the same as optical density (absorbance is the more correct name though).

I think these dye based goggles are much better (safer) than dichroic goggles.