405 and 473, ten years old!

And still lasing like champs!

Wow! I've barely been in the hobby long enough to wonder whether or not my lasers could be wearing down:crackup:

Cool post! +rep

Can't really tell the difference by the color. One should be violet and the other a light blue. I'm glad you have two pointers still working after 10 years. That 473nm must have cost quite a lot back in 2007.

paul1598419 said:

Can't really tell the difference by the color. One should be violet and the other a light blue. I'm glad you have two pointers still working after 10 years. That 473nm must have cost quite a lot back in 2007.

Click to expand...

Yeah I've struggled for years to be able to capture the difference in color between to two. It tends to look more or less correct if I photograph either separately, but photographing them together washes it out. The 405 was Dr. Lava's proof of concept for the flexdrive in a pen. It was originally hooked up to some red diode and pumping out about 200mW, but I requested a blu-ray diode because they were the hotness at the time. I got the 473 in a group buy from Laserglow on sale, but it was still $545 before shipping lol.

I figured it cost something like that. Still don't get why your camera won't differentiate between the two. They are quite far apart in wavelength.

paul1598419 said:

I figured it cost something like that. Still don't get why your camera won't differentiate between the two. They are quite far apart in wavelength.

Click to expand...

Do people get cameras to consistently differentiate them now? Back in the day this was considered normal :undecided:

Wow, very impressive. I do wonder how much longer they will last. $545 for how much power in at 473nm? I knew they wouldn't of been cheap back then, they still aren't that cheap now.

Impressive, after 10 years still going strong? :gj:

Chicxulub said:

Do people get cameras to consistently differentiate them now? Back in the day this was considered normal :undecided:

Click to expand...

I don't think people buy cameras to differentiate colors, per se, but mine is only five years old, has 20M pixels and does differentiate colors quite well. It might just be the state of the art for cameras now, though you can get pickups that are CCDs or CMOS, and the picture density increases every year.

CurtisOliver said:

Wow, very impressive. I do wonder how much longer they will last. $545 for how much power in at 473nm? I knew they wouldn't of been cheap back then, they still aren't that cheap now.

Click to expand...

When I got it from Laserglow, the little card it came with said it had a 17mW peak and a 3mW average. I feel like that was probably pretty close to what it did then. Now it'll give me 2-3mW on a normal day on my Laserbee and peaks at 7-8.

The scary part is, back then $545 was considered cheap for this thing lol

Yeah, that's not much power in today's market. I'm sure it was a bargain back in 2007. Hope it lasts for ten more years.

Those 473 nm sure used to be expensive, and they actually still are when using a DPSS approach even today. Laser diodes are now a viable alternative to get a similar wavelength at much lower cost, though the beam specs on that 10 year old dpss are probably still a lot better.

As for what a camera makes of a colour: Do not care about this at all.

Camera's are built to shoot pictures of landscapes, people, buildings and such naturally occurring things people tend to take photos off. They are not arrays of several million specrometers mounted on a single chip.

Some camera's work better than others for capturing laser beams, but anything with automatic white balancing will surely make a mess. But even if you circumvent that by taking a photo of the dot of an already well-lit wall (and fixed color rendering to 'cloudy' or 'sunny') the monochromatic light may cause the color to be different than what your eyes see.

Now that just shows you how things have changed. You still can't go and pick up a 473 just like you can a cheap 532 but they certainly have become more accessible to us now, and with higher powers. Also 7-8mW peak is still impressive for a very old 473 pointer.

Very nice Chicxulub! As others have said, hope they give you many more years of shinning

-Alex