THIS USER WAS CLUEBYFOURED
What about the fact that some people are just naturally intelligent and talented and take to this stuff instantly?
Tens of years of experience doesn't add up to anything if lessons are never learned.
On the other hand ONE laser show might be all that it takes to make an enthusiast an expert.
James.
Senior Member
Tens of years of experience doesn't add up to anything if lessons are never learned.
On the other hand ONE laser show might be all that it takes to make an enthusiast an expert.
James.
Very well said James... That certainly fits with what I have seen so far.
Ray
NZ
Creaky Old Award Winning Bastard Technologist
From my point of view , the issue is another thing entirely. Due to lack of enforcement of regulation, people can get their hands on things that are very dangerous. Ok, lets not call it pro or amateur, lets call it IIIB and UP.. LIA and the others don't want to address thus issue, and go try to get a copy of a LIA standard or information with out paying for it, or joining LIA. I'd bet, given the chance, since showlaser would be such a small part of the enviroment, LIA wouldn't want anything to do with it. LIA is not ran by laser show people, its ran by industrial and scientific types. Go find out what LIA wants a year for a individual membership etc.
I'm fighting a loosing battle here, so I'm gonna shut up. I'll still submit the proposal anyways.
You know, there is a difference between a propane torch and and a laser, unless it sets a house on fire, a propane torch has a limited damage area, and even then you have time to get out if it sets a house on fire. You can get a propane torch at Walmart. But a laser can reach out and touch you, and you only have two eyes. By the logic you guys are using, you should be able to buy a CLASS IV 6 watt laser at K-Mart. Yet you'd all be terrified if you were on the road with teenagers who didn't take a drivers ed course and insurance.
Now everybodies gonna chime in that there is no evidence of laser injuries in club goers etc. Well, guess what, we probably don't know simply because doctors don't have a checkbox on the mortality and morbidity form for it.
With a Lassie Faire regulatory environment,both here and in China, right now you are pretty much depending on fear of lawyers to keep you safe. You now have a large manufacturer of cheap gear who's power level is going up and up and up, and its a matter of time before it gets in the wrong hands.
from a ad on google that pops up whenever you google laser:
LASER LIGHTS 1/2 Off
Lowest prices in the country!
LASER LIGHTS On Sale Here Today.
You know, the rules require you reproduce the warning logotype for your products in catalogs, seen that much lately? Oh, nobody is enforcing it,
All those YAG laser rangefinders that sell for 150 bucks, by law they were supposed to be crushed. The agreement between the Military and CDRH says military "exempt" devices are never supposed to make it to civillian hands. Oh, Nobdoy is enforcing it.
I walked into a music store a few months ago and took 50 mW right in my eyes when a automated "toy" started up. I went back with a power meter and measured it. To the music store guys, it was just a light. If that were a three watt used Melles in a Mobo fixture, they would not have known the difference.
I'm trying to put a framework in place for when things tighten up, those of you who are serious and want to continue with lasers can get them.
The genie is out of the bag folks on proliferation of laser technology, and you ain't seen nothing yet. Its just a matter of time for fiber lasers to go from IR to visible, and the difficulty with obtaining stable high power green without TE COOLING will go away AND the cost will go down much further then it already has. Direct Fiber Upconversion Lasers will put 10 watts of green in a matchbox powered by a few D batteries. You want that at walmart?
Since a 1 kilowatt fiber yag is now not much bigger then the size of a laser printer, and aircooled and runs silently off 110, Do you not worry about what happens if those get out of control?
You know, I had to spend two or three days training each student I worked with on laser safety and procedures, for far less power then most of you have in a hacked red pointer, yet your willing to walk into SELEM and trust that some one you've never met is not gonna blast you. If I truely followed the rules, anything over three A was interlocked to the lab door. Are you willing to extend that trust to the public as a whole?
Oh, and you know what the number one complaint is from folks who hire laser effects? Quality control in the laserist themselves.
Would'nt it be nice when it you have to do some marketing to say "I'm certified" and "I'm safe" and I have the minimum of decent gear to actually do something , or do you guys hire contractors who have no state license, and no insurance to reroof your house?
So what I gather from you folks here, is that any hobbyist who has a RGB should be able to dash out and do a paid SHOW without a varience, because its cool? One show can make you a professional, ha ha aha aha ha ! I love it.
And James, by your logic in that post, by writing the code for one sucessful model airplane guidance system, that would make a person qualified to design nuclear tipped cruise missiles?
The guys at laserfreak, where under the German rules they need to have a day long safety certification course, have made it possible to get that course for about 120 euros, and have a mini LEM at the same time. Of course their country is the size of 5 of our states, making it easier. No secret handshake, and no difference between pro and hobbyist. It brought the costs down by acting as a group. You come out certified if you pass the test.
This will be my last post on the subject, but I will submit a proposal.
Steve
Last edited by mixedgas; 01-09-2009 at 02:31.
Senior Member
I agree wholeheartedly with what you're saying here, but can you make it so we can use SI units in the test please? Yards and feet make my head hurt.Originally Posted by mixedgas
I really don't see lasers as being any different in terms of safety from driving a car. If you screw up driving a car, you can ruin or end the lives of dozens of people. That's like running a little DPSS of maybe a few hundred milliwatts. If you want to run a big CVL or something like that, well, that's more like driving a bus, and the test for that is proportionally harder. If you want to drive a truck loaded with nuclear waste, well, at that point we start thinking seriously about background checks, operator reliability standards, accreditations, the whole works, proportionally more involved.
The important word here is "proportionally"- if people want to do more dangerous things, we need to make it so that we have checked their safety practice to a much more rigorous standard. The fact is that what I'd call "medium" power lasers are much cheaper and easier to get hold of, and the old system just doesn't work any more.
-J.,
child of the 70s
Senior Member
So what you're now saying is that amateurs shouldn't be allowed to buy anything over Class II ie 5mw. Isn't that even more elitist than the original proposal?
We should all give up our lasers because we aren't within the ILDA definition of a professional?
Is this ILDA now calling for a total ban on the sale of all lasers over 5mw except to ILDA professionals, because thats what it now sounds like.
...and if something does go wrong it then lays the blame squarely at ILDA's door as it was clearly an ILDA professional who was to blame as no-one else could get hold of lasers of more than 5mw.
Wouldn't it be more sensible to restrict sales to professional dealers? I doubt you average hoodie or gang banger would seek out a laser specialist and I doubt they'd pay dealer prices. They're far more likely to buy dodgy deals from ebay for a couple of hundred dollars or less.
Also, where's the role of government agencies in this. The most potentially dangerous lasers sold are high powered pointers, medical, ex-military and pulsed lasers sold on ebay. Yet where is the government in stopping / restricting those sales? Pointers and YAGs that can be fired as pencil beams from the back of a van are far more likely to be used by miscreants than projectors which project pretty patterns.
Well I'll chime in on that one. I'm not saying it means everyones doing safe shows but equally you can't hold the lack of proof of damage as evidence its being done silently. Many opticians in the UK now offer retinal photography as a part of a standard eye examination (to check for macular degerneration and other changes). Don't you think that with all the scanning going on in Europe, and the many thousands of people having these checks daily, opticians would be picking up and reporting retinal burns? I don't know what eye checks take place in the US but in the UK retinal photography is now quite common place as a part of the standard eye examination although some opticians do make it an extra for a nominal charge (£20).
Again where is the government in all of this? Most of this could be enforced through ebay and customs simply by checking that all imported lasers met the relevant CE or US safety requirements. Yet it seems anyone is free to sell or buy and import lasers that don't meet relevant safety standards and that not only makes those lasers potentially unsafe, but it also makes them cheap because its cheaper not to have to fit quality scanners, key switches, IR filters etc.
You said it yourself. Nobody is engforcing it. Restricting everybody for fear they might buy one of the illegal lasers is like banning everyone from dirivng cars becuase they might buy a cut and shut (2 cars welded together in case is a UK excluisve term). The answer here is for the government to ensure these lasers don't reach the market through proper military disposal procedures and to prosecute and sieze those that sell them / that do.
Again thats a customs failure not an operator or consumer failure. Doesn't the US have checks on unsafe toys?
As I said above, restrict them to specialist dealers and I doubt you'll have much problems. On pulsed lasers I doubt anyone would really argue a safety certificate shouldn't be a requirement here provided the course was free or cheap and thus not made elitist by price.
No argument here other than my original comments, it shouldn't be elitist to professionals but safety certification shoudl be cheap or free and available to all.
I don't think anyone said anything about "without a variance" and whilst one show perhaps doesn't make you a professional, I think James' point was there are people with far more safety experience on here and who are far more capable of putting ona safe show than some of the so called experienced professionals out there.
I recently went on a clubbing forum where a DJ said:
This guy is a paid professional (not a home disco DJ but a full blown club DJ / VJ) but he didn't even seem to know what power level Class II was, what the law was, and thought there was no danger from simply shining 600mw lasers into the audience in Greece. Is this really the kind of professional you want to certify in ILDA's name as an "ILDA Professional"? It certainly seems to throw ILDAs apparent theory that experienced professionals do safe shows out of the window. Imagine someone like this without knowledge who then quite possibly goes out and does what he's always been doing because he has X years experience and despite the theory he's learn't with ILDA does it because its always been safe? (I'm not saying this particular guy would do that but there are other professionals who possibly would).no ur been spot on there , not sure what the laws exactly is but thers all kinds of class of lasers ( uk states they have to be class 2 ) , wen we installed lazers at our nite the local council said anything over 200mw had to be at least 3 ft above the head hight, average 6ft so , 9 ft up and the beams were not aloud to drop below that level ...... wen im in greece we point 600mw plus str8 on to the crowd lol .
Here's a photo from a club I recently went to. The laser belonged to one of the visiting DJ's who's an internationally famous name and does major club venues ranging from upper hundred to many thousands of people many nights a week. Is this one of your experienced professionals who's going to do a safe show:
Thats a Chinese laser (pink cased) of I estimate between 30-100mw on a speaker, straight into the eyes on the nearest dancers from 3-4 feet. It was at one point putting out pencil beams (I have it on video) and I took a hit from around 40-50 feet and was left with a sore eye (although a retinal photo a few weeks later at my contact lens check showed no lasting damage). I asked the optican specifically to check. I'm not saying it was unsafe only that it seems potentially unsafe to me.
Short clip from the back, same laser outputing pencil beams (not saying it was dangerous just that I'd view this as potentially dangerous - imagine a pencil beam hit from same distance as in the still above, the people at the front are there just harder to see in the dark here:
http://vimeo.com/2770513
The point I'm trying to make here is Steve is the same as Jame's. Being an experienced professional, even a household name with thousands of shows, doesn't make you safe. So being elitist about who can and cannot qualify on ILDA's course isn't going to save ILDA from bad press or protect the public. All it is going to do is get ILDA the blame when something goes wrong and the person happend to be an ILDA "Professional". Far better to have a general course open to all thats in small print ILDA approved or accredited but not restricted to so called ILDA professionals otherwise the spotlight falls on ILDA when soemthign does go wrong.
BTW non of this is a personal attack on you. Just observations of what I consider to be flaws in the reasoning behind some of the current proposals.
Last edited by White-Light; 01-09-2009 at 03:45.
Creaky Old Award Winning Bastard Technologist
US customs is so undermanned and so under staffed and so busy looking for drugs/ WMDs/bad foot that stuff slips in like crazy.
CDRH has about 6 electro-optics field inspectors and depends on customs to catch the imports.
Its well known in the US that if you want to import a laser, you have the shipper label it power supply, sample, or computer gear.
Our law is strange and outdated. If I sell you a laser projector, I technically have to see a variance before I can hand you the gear. If I sell you just the laser, all I need to do is keep a record of whom I sold it to. But only for the first sale from the manufacturer. Iie you sell it and ship it to the distributer, there is no record after that. With the exception of a few states, there are no local permits required, and still no restriction on sale. In texas and arizona, you need a state license to fire up anything other then class I, Class II or IIIA, but its basically just pay a fee, no test.
If you just want to buy a laser, there is no such restriction, provided the manufacturer has done the paper work to get the design approved. The exceptions are medical devices and imports.
The rules simply are not enforced because there are no one to enforce them. So you get a knee jerk reaction, wait till something happens, then clamp down on the known users in a effort to get the illegal ones.
So what will happen is that something like homeland security may just step in and react.
In OZ, all it took was the Senior Constable stepping in after a incident and declaring all pointers over a few mW as weapons, treating them the same as handguns. Since his ruling was vague and poorly worded, many scientists and laser show folks were scrambling to get firearms licenses for their lasers. So that put it in the hands of local police, whom we all know are wonderfully proficient in engineering.
I'm worried , that could easily occur here, post patriot act.
One thing our government understands is permits and licenses, and they are tending to start to recognize certification of users instead of licensing, ie self enforcement, by many other industries. So if you have some training,have past a test, and thus have shown a willingness to comply, it makes it harder to strip you of your rights to do something.
If we have a voluntary permitting system in place, it makes it much easier to survive a crackdown.
As Heroic said, our 1970s regulatory system is not structured to handle the rapid availability of products with a few hundreds of mWs. Its designed for henes, ie inherently low power lasers, and industrial lasers. Diode based systems did not exist at the time, so it was either a tiny hene, or a lot of power, and usually III phase power to power the laser, thus taking it out of the hands of the individual.
And yes, I'd like to see you demonstrate some safety knowledge before a retailer hands you a 500 mW greenie.
And if a club owner sells you his 20 watt 171 system, you could hand him cash, never tell him your name, and walk out with it,and he'd never get caught, unless you screw up and someone gets hurt or a plane gets illuminated. All he has to say to CDRH if they ask, is that I no longer have the system.
Steve
THIS USER WAS CLUEBYFOURED
Sounds overboard to me. You can go to the Home Depot and buy power tools that are much more dangerous than lasers.
The problem with lasers is that the general public does not realize that they will cause eye damage if you look directly at them and that sums it all up. If the public was aware, they would police themselves. If you went to a concert and the sound guy started shooting BB guns into the audience the crowd or venue security would shut him down because it is common sense. They same type of sensibility needs to be shown with lasers. Venue owners, and even goers need to learn that a laser in the face is not good and if it happens then you tell someone and make them shut it down.
Just educating people that use lasers is not the answer because you can be educated and just not care. Educate everyone and then when some dumbass starts audience scanning the crowd will start throwing shoes and the venue owner will pull the plug. That's the way it has to work.
Since this is a problem and a problem of ignorance, the govt should step up and start having public TV and radio ads stating the dangers of laser pointers until everyone gets it. Once everyone gets it, it will be passed down through generations as common knowledge.
You can't police the world for every little danger. What's next? Certifications for using Skil Saws, kitchen knives, and putting a plug into a 120v receptacle? Guns kill people and need regulation. Lasers don't. People just need to get smarter.
Senior Member
Exactly. For the UK, I think the first base is to release the show guidelines free to all.
The Radiation Safety of Display Laser Installations HS(G)95
Published by HSE Books 1996 ISBN 0 7176 0691
Trying to fleece a few users for a tenner a time for a few leafs of paper is pathetic, the HMSO has bigger fish to fry. By FAR the cheapest way the govt can deal with this is to let all of the public see the same documents that show people have to use, and charge nothing for this, then the public will know what they can expect. Not all will understand, but this way they won't have to pay a solicitor or other expert because lots more people near them will know what it means.
No-one's going to trust a government to legislate if it can't even pull its finger out of its arse long enough to quit trying to profit from a small number of people when it really needs to help a large one, especially when the results of restricting that flow of info will cost it more than it makes. It's incompetent in several ways no government likes to be seen to be incompetent. That guide could be a few tens of KB per download as a PDF, so there is NO excuse for charging £10.
I e-mailed Patrick about this proposal yesterday, and I've been talking with Clandestiny about it since Wednesday. I was thinking about starting a thread here on PL about this whole thing; I should have realized that someone would have already started it by then. (Yeah, I'm still catching up on the message backlog and just now got to this sub-forum.)
Some background on this initiative: It's not new. It was first voted for back in 2004. And the people driving it are the larger laser show production companies. Guys like LaserNet, LaserWave, and so on. Why do they want it? Simple. They want some recognition - some return on their investment in ILDA over the years. Understandably, this has offended a lot of the smaller companies (not to mention individuals) in the ILDA ranks.
Personally, I have no reason to apply for this accreditation program, nor do I have any hope of meeting all of it's goals. But for a smaller laser show company that might aspire to gain accreditation, I can sympathize with their complaints regarding the program - at least as it is currently presented. As for what benefit the larger companies expect to gain from it, I'm really not sure. I honestly see it as bragging rights more than anything.
Nevertheless, here are some of my concerns:
The requirement to have won an award is unreasonable and should be removed as a primary requirement. I have no problem awarding "bonus points" to a company that has received an award, but it should not be a primary requirement. I don't even like the suggestion posed on the ILDA mailing list that you must at least submit a show for an award in order to qualify. This is not an indication of professionalism in my book.
The requirement to have 5 letters of recommendation from previous clients is completely unprofessional, and should be dropped altogether. If a client hires a laser show company to do a show, clearly they do so with the understanding that the laser show company is professional. Now, after the show is complete, ILDA expects the lasers show company to go back to the client asking for a letter of recommendation? Are you kidding me? That can only diminish the reputation of the laser show company in the eye's of the client.
The bulk of the remaining requirements are reasonable if you're looking to put together a "grandfather clause" for existing show companies. But in my opinion, that is not enough. If you are going to roll out an accreditation program like this, then you also need to provide a means for new companies to gain the knowledge required to gain certification. This is where a web-based training program would fit in as one piece of the accreditation puzzle. Steve Roberts' idea of ham-radio-style exams proctored by accredited members is also worth considering.
In fact, I believe that the training / education side of the program should be rolled out *first*, because I think that is where the industry as a whole will see the most benefit. The risk to the industry is largely due to the actions of the uneducated, which leads to public backlash and increased government oversight. Thus education should be a primary goal.
Still, in my opinion the existing laser show production companies that are already operating professionally will gain very little from this program. Seriously - is LaserNet really going to be able to book that many extra shows in a year once they achieve "ILDA accreditation status"? Which clients, exactly, are going to be impressed with this new addition to their business cards?
Finally, I have to question why ILDA is working on this at all, when there appear to be so many other worthy projects out there tht could benefit far more people. How about the laser operator safety training curriculum (both beginner and advanced) that we previewed at SELEM 2008? When will that be finalized? (And will there be any certification tied to it?) Or better yet, what about a serious, scientific challenge to the absurdly low MPE for audience scanning here in the US?
Regardless of my misgivings about the program, it's not enough to drive me away from ILDA. They are the only organization in our corner right now, and they have done a lot of good. Too just throw your hands up and walk away is the cheap way out. Better to stay and argue your point to change things for the better.
Also, I understand that the larger companies were the one's that ponied up the cash last summer for the press release after the Aquamarine Rave incident outsite Moscow. I'm sure everyone appreciates their donation, which helped *all of us*. So I can appreciate why some of them may be pushing for this accreditation program. (Though I fail to see how it will help them all that much.)
The concern is that it could divide the members. I have a hard time believing that this is the goal of the program though. I think it just needs to be modified a bit. I have no problem with the goals being set high. But there needs to be a reasonable path that a company can follow to meet those goals. That reasonable path should include education, not awards and letters of recommendation.
Adam
Last edited by buffo; 01-09-2009 at 06:09.
Senior Member
Well, i hate to say this.. but i agree completely with everything that adam just said..
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