Hello, Ever since I was a kid I have been a fan of lasers and always wanted to get into working with them, and a little over a month ago I got my first laser projector, a little 3w RGB Chinesium special second hand from some DJ on my local classified. It has pretty bad beam divergence at 10 feet and I am pretty sure the galvos are a little cooked, but for the price and as a intro into the hobby it has been a good starting point into giving me the photon addiction. Have since gotten an FB3 with quickshow, and a small smoke machine, and a few other DMX related things, and have had a total blast learning and playing around with it all so far.
My main interests are mostly in beam shows for the time being, I would really like to do more with graphics but despite saying it is a 30kppm machine, I am very sceptical my laser is actually scanning at that speed, because the vast majority of the gryphics i have tried are far to flickery then i think they should be... and quite distorted. Would love to get more into laser hardware and build new or upgrade my laser at some point, but I dont have too much money to throw at this hobby yet. And I think it's fair to say it has been a really steep learning curve over the last few weeks just on the software side of things, let alone starting to learn more about the hardware and optics and electronics, but I will get there soon enough.
Main reason for this post, hoping to meet some cool people and talk about lasers! Give me some heads up and pitfalls to avoid, more or less I would love to hear any advice you wish you knew when you had just started playing with pretty photons. And I would love some more good resources I can look at for learning more about this amazing hobby.
Here is the first show I have made so far, took about a week to finish, but most of the time was spent learning the software. Rather proud of it but feedback and constructive criticism would be appreciated, am still very new to this all.
Filmed my show at two angles,
Inline looking at the projector: (As a extra note am in a small space, so the exclusion zone around the camera lense was rather large, making a lot of the effects that emanated from the center seem out of time on This video. )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug4fgtWAqug
45° looking up at the beams:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2XAP6Tbx_E
Nice to meet you all and hope I will settle in here soon enough.