Another Round of Upgrades and a New Show
Apologies for the subsequent long post, but I'm condensing about 3 months of work into a single post.
It may just be me, but for years now, I have had SELEM dictate how I schedule about 6 months of my free time. Months leading up to SELEM involve laser content development and clean-up (of both my own and others) and the months after SELEM are generally hardware upgrades and then there's the recording and posting to do. Who'd have thought that Adam (Buffo) would dictate how I spend my free time even more than 'mrs. dk' does?!? Anyway, I digress. I just thought I'd share my laser upgrades for anyone who's interested.
As background, my home-based environment is fairly small (roughly 45 feet x 25 feet), so I don't need a lot of power like most of you folks. As such, 2015 has been a very generous year on the higher power single-mode diode front and I wanted to capture some more of that clean-beamed power in my builds. After reviewing each projector, I listed everything I wanted to do to get better matching beam specs and power and the order to do things so that I could 'rob Peter to pay Paul' whenever possible.
What I ended up doing in the end was replacing every multi-mode red I had left with PBS paired single-mode 638nm (Oclaro 120mW HL63603TG; Oclaro 170mW HL63133DG, and the new Mitsubishi 180mW ML520G55. Multi-mode reds were the most glaring problem with my larger projectors. I generally didn't have the room to do spacial filtering and after going through a -6 safety-scan lens, already big beams were complete flashlights. I dropped my power by 30% or more by going all paired single-mode 638nm, but what I ended up with looked significantly brighter due to the beam profile. In fact, I think my projectors are probably more red-heavy than lacking.
Next were the blues. Replacing paired single-mode 120mW Osram PL450B blues with the new 250mW Osram PLP450 was a no-brainer. For projectors that needed more than the 300mW that the PLP450 could safely provide, I doubled them up, otherwise I stole the blue cubes (generally Dave's (aka LasershowParts) blue PBS cubes) and used them for the green upgrades.
Finally the greens. I started employing the PLP520-B1 120mW 520nm greens when DTR started selling them, but over-driving them even a little (e.g. up to 160-180mW) resulted in a very fast decline in their output. At first I thought it could be spikes from drivers, but I saw the same results with all of my favorite drivers (BBE's, Dave's and InnoLaser's). LasOrbs, dedicated power supplies, and everything else I tried failed to stop the rapid decay. Thankfully, the 100mW NIchia NDG4216 515nm came out this year and can be driven to the same power levels without degradation thus far. Pair a couple of those babies together and enjoy 250mW + of 515nm post the pbs cube.
While making these upgrades, I improved everything else I could think of - near-field alignment, choosing the best collimation lenses, upgrading PSUs, replacing fans with quieter ones, better matching full white levels, permanently mounted safety-scan lens holders, etc. I also went back and adjusted software grey-scale levels, implemented gradated BAM (which I wasn't previously aware LSX could do), and reset dozens of target zones.
The results of all of these upgrades, are notable in my opinion and I found them well worth the effort and expense. (I'm not sure my credit cards agree.) We are only talking about 800mW to 2W total power each, but the beam specs are as good as I've seen in any professional build (as they should be for single-mode builds).
Although I still have some 532nm greens and a few multi-mode blues in the mix, I would have a bit of trouble telling which was which if I didn't already know. I'll bet several of you out there can tell, however.With the resulting great beam specs, all of these projectors can now do double-duty (beams and graphics) and a couple of them can even do lumia as well.
Anyway, enough with words! Below are some pics of a couple projectors and a show demonstrating the updated environment.
-David
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Originally Posted by SaltyRobot
Bradfo69
