Output Comparison Gas Lasers Vs Diode Aser(dpss)

[allthatwhichis]

I know how you feel. I remember seeing the deep blues at the Pink Floyd Spectacular and fell in love with.. what is it 456 for argon? Then at the Audience Scanning seminar at LDSI (?) the Lightwave projectors... I think those are the 445nm Arctos. My life would be complete, at least laser wise, if I owned only a 2W projector that was a clone of one of those.

[mixedgas]

I know how you feel. I remember seeing the deep blues at the Pink Floyd Spectacular and fell in love with.. what is it 456 for argon? Then at the Audience Scanning seminar at LDSI (?) the Lightwave projectors... I think those are the 445nm Arctos. My life would be complete, at least laser wise, if I owned only a 2W projector that was a clone of one of those.

My two favorites are "Atomic Flamingo Magenta", named that by a member of the ilda techcomm, and the name has stuck. Its 457 + a little 633. Thene there is Nuclear Sunkist orange, possible only with a excess red whitelight or a pure krypton. Its 568 yellow + some 482 blue (not 488) with a bit of 647. Older gas laser setups for biology uses were set up to lase blue, red, yellow, but kill green as green competed with the yellow for gain and was where many of the dyes they were exciting glowed, making filtering difficult. Those are fun to play with , and I have a few pairs of the air cooled RYB optics that have a long enough radius to go into a 1 meter coherent or lexel.

I also have some medical optics that lase green , yellow and a little blue, and while a 1 meter class krypton would put out ~2 watts in the red when brand new, the 550 mW or so of 2 yellows, a 2 blues and the 530 + 520 greens looks at least 3X brighter then the reds, and you can fake a white with that too. My 2 friends who have seen this call it "fakafloyd", because you can make it look like a pink floyd copper vapor show in color. I only get to see it though when we install a new krypton tube at work, as my mixed gas tube has argon in it, which knocks down the KR green lines.

Another neat one is copper vapor, its a wickedly bright bluish looking yellow-green to most people, and a very unique color, which is why they sell so well at ~ 7,ooo$ for 3-5 watts in europe. just dont ever let anyone audience scan you with the high peak power pulses.

also the yellow hene line, well, that golden color is impossible to describe until you see it.

LCD monitors just dont even come close to making these colors, and leds are too broadband to simulate them, so its only possible to see them with lasers. You also need the coherent speckle for some reason.

so dont go just RGB yet, yearn for more. However I have not had the opertunity to mix 405 with 640,532m, and 477, so maybe at selem we can try some color mixing. 405 is a little too far down the curve to se ewell when scanned, although there was one gawd awful club system that sold a lot, that had 405 + 658 at 50-100 mW each. We used one at LaserRave (tm). It made interesting beams, but was hard to see with the other lasers on. I bet James will bring his hene/argon setup so some SELEMers will see the light (pun intended) . I may be flying in, so I have no idea what I'm bringing yet.

Steve