class II greens?

does anyone know of any cheap class II (<1mW) green lasers? a friend wants a laser to play with her cats, and if a cat's eye is anything like a human eye i'd guess green would be brighter to them too... and with <1mW she'd probably not have to be too worried about damaging the cat's eyes accidentally, but all the green class IIs i can find (including one site - blue sky marketing - unscrupulously saying a 1mW green at night is like a lightsaber, and having an image of what's obviously either a much more powerful laser or a photography trick) are a lot more expensive than the cheap 5mWs that are around (cores, destructive gear, etc)... so, any class IIs that are £20 ($40) or under?

Well, she could always get a leadlight and modify it so it's not near as powerful. And 5mW won't really damage a cat's eye so it should be fine at 5mW. When my cats were playful they loved my modded leadlight (Probably something like 15mW) and they aren't running into walls a year  later.

I have never seen one within that price range.  :'( In fact this is the best one I can find, and it is NOT cheap. Probably you best option is to mod a core to low power.

Or you could by any green laser for Wicked Lasers, it porbably won't be much more than 1mw.....

Not really much demand for II greenies. Perhaps she can make due with that red one I sent you? At least those are cheap as hell, even if it dies its not hard to replace. I'm not sure what the response curve is for cats, but I seem to recall its different from humans and they may even see red better? (Vague memory of hearing something like that, but don't take my word for it)

I myself haven't seen many Class II greens, but Arnold at Atlasnova has Class II greens but they are around $60. But Arnold did say at CPF one time that if you needed a 5-10mW green for $40 you could call him, so I figure he could probably give you a 1mW for $40.

Styropyro's suggestion might work, but I think if you tune it down more than likely it will mode shift. I know that both of my pens mode shift on nearly dead batteries, and my 15mW actually shifts so much to TEM10 on low batteries (really, really low batteries, there's probably about a tenth of a milliwatt of green coming out. You can barely see the dots with the lights off) that the two dots are about 10 or 12 millimeters apart!

For pseudo:

This site (I can't post links, it's videoforcats.com/catvision.htm) has a picture showing what the light spectrum looks like to a cat. It seems like they mainly see green and yellow, and not a whole lot of red. Which is odd, since the 1mW red is the ultimate cat toy.  :-/

a core and low batteries

thanks lots yeah, that 1mW red might work fine... or a 5mW might not be a problem if she's careful.

Yeah, that's probably a good idea. But, 1mW red keychain pointers break way too easily. Are you in the UK? I know that ThinkGeek carries a very nice 5mW red pointer for $10, and I'm fairly sure that they ship internationally.

you can get 4 reds and 100 batterys to power them from dx for less than $10


lasers http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.1101


batterys http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.61

i've had mine for time now and they all still work as good as new.

When it comes to cats I think its best to go with green, because red appears as a very dull color (almost gray) to them, while green is a strong color to them.