Assessing laser size for show?
Ok, so this may not have a definitive answer, however it would be interesting to have you guys take on it....
How do you go about assessing the size of laser required for a given show? E.g. when does 100mW green become not enough and 300mW is neccessary?
I understand the environmental factors such as smoke in venue, etc, but as this can be subjective (is visible light ok, or does it have to be 'cutting the air') I'm curious to hear your answers.
One of the problems that I've encountered is 'laser oneupmanship' (or is laser power directly linked to penis size in the same way that Ferarri's are?) As an example, I was lighting a covered outdoor festival stage last autumn and someone i knew from a few years back appeared out of the blue and said they were doing the laser display (great, old friend, working the same stage for a weekendfun ensued...) On the second day a guy came up and asked me if i was doing the laser show and i said no, but gave him the details of the laser that was being used as he was also a laserist. His first comment was 'Oh, thats far too small, it should be at least 'X' big, I run lasers that are Y and Z big for these sorts of events'. As it turned out the laser was great! So, how do you assess size needed, or is it simply down to experience?
Coming from an audio background, I'm also aware that power is not directly linked to brightness e.g. 200mW is not a whole lot greater than 100mW in my experience (in the same way that adding 5000w of amps and speakers to a 5000w speaker stack does not give you twice the sound)
So to keep things simple, lets deal with monochrome examples, and of a DPSS nature so there's no confusion when making comparisons with power ratings.
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Originally Posted by norty303
