Green laser safety googles for 10$!?!?!?

I was going to ask for a referral to somebody. Do i need to worry about IR though?

Alexizupinhea said:

Just checked and got similar results (using 110/120mW PHR). The dot was a little brighter than the green's was... but, it still protects fine.

Click to expand...

Take into account that the human eye is only about 1/1000 as sensitive for 405nm light as for 532nm light! So if the dot appears a bit brighter... better assume it provides insufficient protection for direct BR beam exposure.

EDIT: on 2nd thought, the 405nm radiation makes paper fluoresce, considerably increasing the apparent brightness. Maybe try with something that doesn't fluoresce. The enamel in a bathtub or washbasin should work...

Yeah, everything you're saying makes sense, including the controversy. I'm surprised I didn't think about it at first. But, I'll check some time soon. I do however believe they work fine because I compare them to the OEM Laser System goggles, and they seem to work just as good. I know that's not the best way to test them, but... I and others trust the OEM goggles, and if these work as good as them, I think there's nothing to fear.

i get tired over this "are your eyes only worth 10$" sh*t. so, are your eyes only worth 100$ instead?
protective googles are NOT rocketscience. protective googles are NOT expensive to produce. research and certification is expensive, but this has almost nothing to do with what you finally hold in your hands. i wouldnt trust *anything* protecting my body from permanent and in this case dramatic injury without testing. not my 10$ 405nm-protective googles nor my (effectively) 200$ multiwavelength googles from oem.
for gods sake, test your googles, and get whatever suits you! not everyone can or wants to spend that much money. some people need a different "size", i wear prescriptive glasses under my googles for example. some people want *all* light blocked (fluorescence), some people want to see a bit to focus for burning.

what simpler than testing unknown and uncertified googles? shine your laser through it. anything comes through? how much? they are 10$? get several different, test them, keep the best! bleaching? "catastrophic dye breakdown"? what then, simply watch how long it takes for your laser to get through! certified googles hold up for 10 second and may or may not leak dangerous laserpowers after 10 seconds.
now anyone tells me any fact that speaks against uncertified googles tested this way, where nothing gets through after 10 seconds, when shining right onto the googles?

there are only two problems, which are common with certified ones: green lasers mostly leak IR, which probably isnt filtered by most googles. second, you may get stray laserlight into your eyes from a weird angle, if the googles dont fit without space to your face.

the most important thing for me is: get googles! if there are only 100$ googles, most people wont get them, or only after playing with lasers for months already. second: if they are possibly 10$, get more of them! enough for all friends which may watch you with your laser!

you people crying for certified googles do more harm than help. in the right intention, but nevertheless. its not like we are talking to adult people in a lab with 100k$ laserequipment.

*edit:
two more things: you can test your googles with exactly the laser you use.
and finally: laser protective googles are nothing like "sun-watching googles" made to stare into the sun at an eclipse. they are there to block the 0.5s of accidental laserexposure.

/rant

manuel

Krutz said:

i get tired over this "are your eyes only worth 10$" sh*t. so, are your eyes only worth 100$ instead?

Click to expand...

Good retort :beer:

Is it possible that you got that "certified googles hold up for 10 second" from the OEMlasersystems web site? That's where I encountered it. One question, am I the only one noticing that this statement mentions neither a wavelength nor a power density... so it's absolutely worthless?

Also, regarding IR protection (I've been waiting for days for someone to bring that up): the hobbyists goggles from OEMlasersystems, which are generally touted as the nonplusultra, are guaranteed to offer no IR protection! (only the ones that explicitely mention "IR protection" in their description do).

with a quick googlesearch i couldnt find any "official" stating of "must hold up 10 seconds minimum". i wondered this too since quite some time.. in fact i can imagine scenarios where a laser destroys googles in less than 10 seconds.. ;-)
who knows, perhaps the plastic would burn to some coal-like crisp, which couldnt easily be burnt through? you cant burn ash!

most of my googles are dye-colored plastic. those are absolute evenly colored, no matter if 10 or 100$. they all will definitely block much longer than it takes to start melting them. i have some coated protective googles too, against 405nm, from a groupbuy. i wouldnt recommend them. they are unevenly coated, they slightly change color, both reflected and transmitted. one scratch, and they dont protect there any more. finally, they reflect the beam, which has problems in itself..

yes, the IR.. there are different opinions here about if its a danger at all.. i didnt check (like measuring power with filters and checking for divergence) for myself yet, so i didnt decide on that yet.

i think the popularity of oemlasers googles is frothy's credit. but hey, i trust my eyesight on those 200$ googles! *runs laughing and hides*

manuel

I've seen the 10s figure cited by at least two suppliers (Thor Labs and GMP) both of which point to the ANSI Z136.1 and EN 207 Laser safety standards. Obtaining the actual standards documents requires purchasing them from their respective organizations, which can be expensive. I can't find any online versions since they're not really hot commodities.

As for testing, it's fine and well to do your own testing, but we don't all have the right equipment for that; plus, there's the hassle of finding and testing different models. There's also a chicken and egg problem in that your eyes won't be protected if you're testing the goggles under test. I'd rather put my trust in well-established standards and independent certification rather than some jerry-rigged experiment and hobbiest collections of lasers.

The issue isn't $10 or $100, it's whether you can trust your goggles to protect your eyes. I've got some $20 red laser enhancement goggles, the same kind you'd find on Wicked Lasers, I got at Tool King. I do trust them to protect my eyes against green lasers (especially mine), since I've shone beams through them and measured the output for long durations, etc. Unfortunately, they're almost too good at blocking light and I can barely see the dot at all. So I bought some nice goggles from OEM, which have a lower, but still very sufficient, OD rating and good protection for IR as well. One thing nice about the certification is that I don't need to overkill the OD to "be sure" of its protection, and they're also designed (as encouraged by the standards) to permit as much other light as possible in. I like the color (off-yellowish) more than the deep red of my old ones.

Alexizupinhea said:

...

Click to expand...

Are they using A RUBBER BAND AND A Q-TIP??

I can quite obviously see now that they do have the proper tools for testing goggles. I'm sorry to have doubted them.

Right. They should have a certified, FDA-approved "laser pen holder assembly", operated in a government-run Laser Goggles Testing Lab by a trained goggle testing equipment specialist. You can't trust a Q-tip and rubber band to hold a laser reliably.

LOL thats my picture
I also made a movie: I uploaded it to my server for you:
Movie for the lasergoggles

speechless.


...and i downloaded the clip several times!

oh, wait, i think i get it now.. lol!

manuel

Yeah, as bionicbadger was saying, and I thought I should mention this, is that these goggles almost block too much light, so u can't see the dot from far away. I mean, really I think I only use my goggles for burning, and when testing/setting up my laser scanner. It works alright for both, but sometimes the OEM is better since you can see the dot more, yet it should still be sufficient protection.

I've bought these just to see (I have the OEM certified ones btw). I can't see much of a difference between them and my OEM pair. However, I don't have an LPM so that means nothing. But what I do have to say is that they are something and in this case something is always better than nothing. I use them for when I'm "showing off" to my friends and burning things and what not.

I actually think the 7.99 goggles are the exact same as O-like sells for 24$. They look identical.

I got some of the $7.99 ones in the mail a week or two ago. I haven't time to do some real tests on them but with my 75 mW greenie, 10 mW comes through. Yes, it was measured with an LPM.

That will be IR (if it were green, you'd know it).