Buying new laser, Goldenstar or Laserworld???

[masterpj]

goldenstar isn't the best out there but compared to laserworld it's an easy decision.
if you are american buy a projector through the pangolin refferal network.. saves you a lot of hassle as they take care of you.

[Colin290]

Hi Colin,

In general the best way to go, especially starting out with lasers, is to pick something that fit's the area you use it for.
So if the area you are servicing is about say 20 x 20 mtr = 400 sq.mtr = 400 mW green or 1200 mW RGB.
This is just a generic rule of thumb though.

As for laser sources. You will want to have the sources as close to each other as possible. Systems with variable beam-sizes like the GS mentioned above are fun to fiddle with, they are cheap, but due to the various sources you do not get the wanted effects and clear beams that you'd like. When the beam sizes vary you will end up with for example a yellow beam with a red edge. Not good.

I can safely advise the 520laser systems, we sell them here in The Netherlands too via 520laser.nl .
Next to those we offer various systems in our FD Series, ranging from 800 mW up to 28 Watt. All full diode with matching beamsizes and balanced from the start, so white will be white at full power.

To control lasers with DMX is an option with many of the models we offer, yet we feel that the QS you've got is probably a better option and offers more options and far better color .

One tip I will offer you: If you decide to use a Full Diode system, regardless of the brand, and you find the colors you get from QS are not what you want or expect, then set your RGB settings in QS to LOG system. Many diode drivers respond better to LOGarithmic setting.

If you need any info or have questions about our systems, just send me a message or find us on FB.

Peter,
Cheers for the info, could you send me a message with pricing and delivery costs from the Netherlands of the 520 club 800 and club 2000 lasers that you sell? And just wondering are the 30k scanners in the 520 lasers on par with say DT30 scanners?

Thanks!

[Colin290]

Hi Colin,
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Keep asking questions! That's the best way to learn. Yes, you can hook ILDA cables together to extend their length. What I guess I meant to say was I've never seen a vendor sell a 50 meter ILDA cable. The longest you commonly see is (in the US) 100 feet which is somewhere close to 30 meters. But yes, there have been times where we've hooked a couple of 50's together when we didn't have 100 or, added a 25 to the end of a 100 if you needed just a little more reach. There is a maximum length that you can reach with an ILDA cable before you start losing signal but, I don't recall exactly what that length is. I know there are plenty of smart people on here that can just spout that off without even thinking about it. Regardless, I will stand by what I said that I doubt... with that power of laser... that you'd do a show that needed a cable 50 meters long. You'd end up so far away you'd be staring off in the distance and saying, "Is that little glow way over there my laser??" (Not that bad but, you get my point.)
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Just to clarify your "beamspecs on the Goldenstar versus pure diode" comment. Just because something is "diode" doesn't mean it has better beam spec's. Think of it this way.... in many cheaper projectors, the colors tend to be different diameters. Take a static white beam and shine it on a wall 100 feet away. Walk over to where it lands on the wall and look at it. The red may be the size around of a tennis ball. The blue might be the diameter of a golf ball and the green might be the diameter of a marble. The only "white" you're really going to have is the size of the marble since it contains all three colors. The objective is for all three of those colors to be as close to the same size as possible. Some of that is done through beam correction, meaning that some lenses are used with each color to try and get them all the same size. Optics are expensive so, cheaper projectors aren't going to always have great beam specs. Some diodes simply produce larger spots. 635nm red for example is generally really big and hard to use optics to tighten it down. The seller can still lure you into thinking you're getting a lot of red by saying "It has 3 watts of red!" That's all fine and dandy but, if it's the size of a tennis ball, who cares? That's 3 watts spread out over a large area so it's not going to be that bright even though it's three watts. And if you're doing any kind of graphics, it's like drawing with a big fat kludgy marker rather than a fine tipped pen. And it's hard to take those diodes and optically correct them to make a tighter beam.
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638nm is better but still can be tough. 637nm can give you a nice tight beam without a huge amount of correction but, it's also expensive.
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Your blues which are commonly 445nm or 462nm tend to be a certain diameter and your 520nm greens are another. 532nm green is actually a different technology called DPSS and gives you a might tighter beam but, the trade off is it being affected by temperature, coming out of alignment and other problems. All of these wavelength colors tend to also play into what combined colors and, the quality of white that can be produced. 445 plus 520 plus 638 while still red geen and blue are going to look very different than say 462, 532 and 637. Or.... whatever combination a manufacturer has come up with.
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With TTL you've got 100% power on each of those three colors all the time so, you're stuck with red, green blue, cyan, magenta, yellow and white. And whatever color magenta is made by the blue source and red source or, whatever color yellow you get from the red and the green and whatever color cyan you get from the green and the blue. With analog, you now have control over the percentage of each color so, maybe 45% red and 81% blue and 14% green for example, is going to give you a lot more interesting color and.... will look more like what your preview window in Quickshow actually looks like. Glad it sounds like you've come around to the idea of analog vs. TTL. TTL is also a method of making cheap lasers look brighter.
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Yes, I would also say that it will be easier for you to swap out a module than it would be to swap out scanners. It may still require modification to make sure it fits but in the long run, I think changing a module down the road is going to be much more simple.

Bradfo69,

Ah I understand what you mean about the cables, no need to buy a long one then if they can be linked anyway.

So with more entry level lasers does red tend to be the problem colour in terms of its divergence?

I did some digging there with videos of the 520 green vs 532 green and the 532 green seems to have a richer green colour would this be fair to say?

So regarding the analog modulation, could it be used as a method of adjusting the colours in the laser to make for example a white beam tainted with red more white by removing some the the red's intensity? if you get what I'm trying to say.

Just another question out of curiousity, I have been playing around with QS on my computer even though I have no laser yet and am hugely impressed by the options available to customise beam shows etc. Say I'm doing hot beams and waves and speeding the 'Animation Speed' up to 400% which is the max and maybe adding in oscillating effects etc, is this very hard on scanners of say DT30 standard or is it considered easy for a good 30k scanner?