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FrozenGate by Avery

How expensive were green lasers when they first came out?

S

SweetPotes

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So I saw a post from 2004 while randomly looking at pics, and a guy paid $1100 for a 100mW green laser. This is freakin' insane. Did he get ripped off or did green lasers really cost that much back then? If anyone knows.

I know that green lasers were commercially developed in 2000.
 





2000 isn't when they were first built!!!!! And yes They were quite expensive
 
SweetPotes said:
So I saw a post from 2004 while randomly looking at pics, and a guy paid $1100 for a 100mW green laser. This is freakin' insane. Did he get ripped off or did green lasers really cost that much back then? If anyone knows.

I know that green lasers were commercially developed in 2000.
Click to expand...

I could find reports online of green laser pointer incidents dating back to 1997. Yes, they really were that expensive. Green lasers (we have green diodes now, but they came around in ~2010) are much more complex than most red or blue pointers. Instead of just powering a laser diode, they have to power a much stronger 808nm laser diode to optically pump a neodymium doped YAG crystal, which emits 1064nm light. the 1064nm light is then passed through a nonlinear optical crystal (in pointers it's almost always KTP) where 2 photons of 1064nm light "collide" to create a 532nm photon with twice the energy and half the wavelength. This 532nm radiation is the green color we see from most laser pointers.

As you can imagine, the power requirements are much higher, because you need a much stronger diode to produce equivalent output due to losses in the system. Not only that, but both Nd:YAG and KTP can be expensive.

TL;DR: They really were that expensive
 
Yeah, I believe that green DPSS lasers existed as pens as early as 1996/97, but were well over $1000 then. Even for 5mW. I got my first green pen in 2003 and it was $250 for just 5mW.
 
I think 2000 is about when the first DPSS green battery powered pointers became available, but there were green lasers long before that, lab lasers, I guess HeNe and Argon or something. $1100 sounds too high for 2004 but am not sure, by 2007 he could have got one at that power for under $200, but lasers do vary a great deal in quality and price. In 1970 there were HeNe lasers selling for $50,000, am not joking, I had a catalogue from Spectra Physics in 1970, wish I could have saved it.

Alan
 
My highschool science teacher got a 3-4mW 532nm in 1998 and he paid about $600 for it. I thought it was the coolest thing ever then lol.
 
It depends a bit on your definition of a 'green laser'.

I've seen 532 nm dpss in the early 90s, but that involved a separate Nd:YAG laser and a doubler crystal some distance from it. I have no idea on the price tag for the doubler crystal (it was grown at the university), but the pump laser wasn't extremely expensive. It only operated in pulse (as in 1 a second) mode though. The pump laser itself was strong enough to breakdown air through a lens (causing a spark in mid air), and the green light was very faint regardless.

It would be hard to tell how much the first handheld 532 cost unless there is a record of purchase for it. When they became available to the public the price tag was $1000-ish, but i can imagine units sold for much more just before that.
 
The earliest green laser pointer that I know of anyone buying was in 1991, pretty sure it was a billionaire too.

A relative spent $4100 for a 1.3mw handheld green in 1994, so that's probably pretty close to how much they cost when they *first* came out.

Anyone remember how expensive 405nm pointers were before blu-ray?
 
That's interesting, I didn't know they were available that early. Imagine paying $600-$4100 for something you can now buy for $10. That was also much more money at the time.

Alan
 
I got my first 3mW 532 from Deharpport Trading Company in the summer of 1998 for $399. I now know that it was an early CNI glp and was probably around 10mW.
 
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