The amazing gball

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Hmm, does this mean that if we just leave the diode attached to the cylinder with the Gball that it'll produce a pretty good collimated beam? What's the divergence on it?

i'm so surprised that i lost all words...

But I mean, is the gball sufficient to just not bother with any other lenses? I thought the problem with some of these lenses that came with the diode blocks was that they were "optimized" for just creating a big wall of light, not so much a nice beam. The gball could be just making the output more 4:3 aspect ratio to create more even fill. It's not a bad thing, but I just want to know if it makes it nice for using right out of the box with a relatively nice collimated beam.

Huh... I'll have to experiment with that myself. Pretty darn cool!

Are you sure it's not just truncating the sides of the beam like those "long focal length" lenses? It looks like the sides are rounded as if it were being blocked on the sides of a rounded aperture.

Subbed!
I've been wanting to do a blue build for a while, and was getting ready to pull the trigger on the 44 diode, but these recent "discoveries" have made me hold off on that.

Has anyone heard of any possible pending GBs on any of these gball diodes yet? Or are we still waiting on official prices and power numbers for them?

They still might truncate the beam if it provides a consistent beam pattern though as compared to something like a G2 type pattern with all the emitter artifacts. It would help create a consistent pattern and reduce the number of artifacts for the projected image. It'd be kind of like those checkered pattern lenses that are in front of projector lamps in order to make the light evenly distributed.

Mostly I'm just trying to make sure that it's doing what is stated. The "long focal length" lenses for the 638nm lasers would truncate the edges but make a better looking beam. That LFL lens was also situated further away from the diode itself in the same manner as that G-ball lens. Is the output power from a G-ball lensed diode the same as the G2 output power? Does the beam pattern remains the same at all distances?

I'll have to try and measure the divergence on mine. I don't think I have the G-ball, but I do have some G9 lenses and others.

With the 638nm lasers depending on where I had the lens focuses I could cause one axis to expand faster than the other only because one axis would converge to a point and then expand again. The way I would collimate it is to make one of the axes retain the same width all the time so that I could try using a cylindrical lens with it.

I'll definitely need to get my cylindrical pair setup with my lasers, though I've mostly concentrated on getting those 638nm reds corrected since they're usually the limiting color channel.

RedCowboy said:

These are the upgraded diodes, efficiency is everything to the maker, they are not clipping anything, maximum efficiency is what they are after....

Click to expand...

one way to tell would be to LPM one with the g ball then remove it and meter it with a g2. if clipping is happening the output should indicate it. unless the g balls have much better % transmission which seems unlikely