Strange afterglow in BluRay

I think Pwnstar originally posted a thread about this, before the server blew chunks.

If you let your eyes dark adapt, hold the pointer close and look into the lens, immediately after turning it off. On mine you've got to get the viewing angle just right to see, it reminded me of looking through telescope using a poor eyepiece at high magnification. I didn't see two green dots, but a strange blueish rectangle of light. It lingered for as long as I looked (about 5 minutes) and seemed to scintillate strangely as it faded. I also found myself using 'averted vision' to study it, another astonomy thing. At times what I saw seemed distinct, other times it was strangely amorphous and I couldn't seem to focus on it.

I tried it with my DIY ~100mW red, and the diode only glowed for 5-10 seconds before fading. It was red, like looking at the diode stripe.

The diode seems to have a strange ghost life as the cap discharges. Perhaps about as close as you can get to examining the business end of the laser and have your eye live to tell about it.

The was using the diode from an Xbox HD drive.

I have a theory on this. When you watch the die on the blu-rays glow as the caps discharge, you see the 'normal' color, as well as a slightly different color at one point, which appears to be where the wire attaches to the die itself. Its right on the edge of the glow. This has more of a weird greenish glow. My theory is that when the diode is actually lasing, its that weird 'green' point that is actually creating the yellow that some see in the dot.

Who knows... just a thought.

I noted it sometimes, I think that this is caused by capacitors discharging into the diode. These diode absorbs low power, so the capacitors deliver the voltage slowly than other high powered laser diode.
The change in color is because these diode have a peak of wavelenght at 405 nm but only at nominal power: if you are under threshold the wavelengt may be slighly different, or the same if you are supplying too much current.

The rectagle probably is where the line comes from on the red burners. and if the bluray was more powerfull, you would probably also see that line faintly across the dot.