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Do Aussie customs check lasers anymore?

SyKo

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Nov 27, 2013
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So if you looked back a few years when they first initiated the ban on lasers over 1mW there are plenty of posts all over the internet of people having lasers confiscated and the likes.

However noticeably eBay Australia has exploded with overspec laser pointers and theres been a lack of threads about people having pointers confiscated.

My question is, do customs check lasers anymore?
It seems that so long as you have a sticker saying 1mW its golden.

Whilst this is great and all for Pointer enthusiasts it would still be a far better situation if the government would just let people label lasers correctly and thus we would have '200mW Burning 660nm laser" rather than '1mW Burning, 5 mile, Deathstar phaser laser pointer" listings and people could actual purchase the power they require.

So, has anyone had a run in with customs recently or even had their laser pointer seized?
 





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Feb 26, 2015
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hahahaha i ordered a Jetlaser Ple-pro 800mw 532nm last year and the package were not even touched by custom.....
 

Benm

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Aug 16, 2007
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What are they supposed to do - insert batteries into each one of them and measure output power? Doesn't seem that feasible to me, so looking at the sticker might be enough - though any sensible person might wonder why this '1 mW laser' weighs a pound and is powered by batteries that could probably jumpstart a car.

Then again there is the enteral cat and mouse game between customs, fda-ish clubs and people trying to avoid their control over things.

I remember the ban on retail sale of broadcast FM transmitters here, which could be circumvented by selling it as a 'kit'. This 'kit' would consist of the completed transmitter with the exception of one component you had to solder in yourself (a reverse-polarity protection diode or something obvious like that).

I prefer the 'kit' approach over mis-labeling really. Not that a honking big handheld laser is that likely to actually be a 1 mW unit, but some idiot might actually believe so because it says so on the label and blast someone else in the face with a class IV having little clue of what the unit is actually capable off.

And while we might consider something like that to be idiotic, someone that has zero experience with lasers could easily believe the unit is safe to user as a presentation pointer despite it's heavy weight and lithium batteries.

I guess anyone importing lasers labeled as 1 mW should remove that label and replace it by a proper one after receiving it, just to avoid disasters like that.
 




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