- Joined
- Feb 4, 2010
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Hey everybody, I got something crazy again.
After over 10 years in the hobby I finally managed to get my hands on my dream laser. I spent some time talking with @Phillip here about some odd laser diodes he can get his hands on, and our discussion drifted in the direction that I already have a 485nm from Sharp and a 483nm from Osram, and knew my favorite color lied pretty much directly in the middle... And then we landed on this unnamed diode. A few weeks (and a lot of $) later, I can now say I think it's awesome that I have a 2W 484nm laser which is quite literally the brightest I can get my favorite color down to the nanometer. I really wanted to start this post with a huge thank-you for getting this over to me!
How does it compare to our more common 488s?
For color, I think the first couple posts show it well. The color in the graph sure does too:
So now for the elephant in the room... "2W diode" pretty much always means multimode, and multimode means bad divergence, right? Right. It's unfortunately about as bad as our 7W blues... Spot comparison with a normal sharp 488, 1W 520, 2W 484 and 7W 450
One thing that surprised me a bit is how little the lens matters to tame this thing. I'm used to seeing more noticeable differences, but really the G2 lens was the only lens that made it bigger, G8, G3, 3E and even the green 2E lenses made no noticeable difference in the beam shape. A bit disappointing... I think down the road I will be getting a small optical table and cyl lens pairs to tame this thing, but I would also need to coordinate that with a more deserving host than a maglite... and I have some other projects coming up that are chewing up my budget, so for now this is on-hold.
One other thing I started doing recently was adding a dust window to the diodes, and putting o-rings (the ones for mechanical keyboards are perfect) around the outside of the lens barrel. The intent here is to never have to expose the diode to dust aside of pressing it in the module. That way any time I have to clean any optics, it's just that outside surface that needs attention. I recently had my 7W blue diode window get all messed up from dust after swapping lenses, and I absolutely am not letting that happen on this irreplaceable diode. To those worried about back-reflections, I ordered AR coated glass from edmund optics, put a bead of glue down and cured it, then glued the lens to the front to have it slightly off-set.
Here's a few more pics to end off the post. More can be found in the album here:
After over 10 years in the hobby I finally managed to get my hands on my dream laser. I spent some time talking with @Phillip here about some odd laser diodes he can get his hands on, and our discussion drifted in the direction that I already have a 485nm from Sharp and a 483nm from Osram, and knew my favorite color lied pretty much directly in the middle... And then we landed on this unnamed diode. A few weeks (and a lot of $) later, I can now say I think it's awesome that I have a 2W 484nm laser which is quite literally the brightest I can get my favorite color down to the nanometer. I really wanted to start this post with a huge thank-you for getting this over to me!
How does it compare to our more common 488s?
For color, I think the first couple posts show it well. The color in the graph sure does too:
So now for the elephant in the room... "2W diode" pretty much always means multimode, and multimode means bad divergence, right? Right. It's unfortunately about as bad as our 7W blues... Spot comparison with a normal sharp 488, 1W 520, 2W 484 and 7W 450
One thing that surprised me a bit is how little the lens matters to tame this thing. I'm used to seeing more noticeable differences, but really the G2 lens was the only lens that made it bigger, G8, G3, 3E and even the green 2E lenses made no noticeable difference in the beam shape. A bit disappointing... I think down the road I will be getting a small optical table and cyl lens pairs to tame this thing, but I would also need to coordinate that with a more deserving host than a maglite... and I have some other projects coming up that are chewing up my budget, so for now this is on-hold.
One other thing I started doing recently was adding a dust window to the diodes, and putting o-rings (the ones for mechanical keyboards are perfect) around the outside of the lens barrel. The intent here is to never have to expose the diode to dust aside of pressing it in the module. That way any time I have to clean any optics, it's just that outside surface that needs attention. I recently had my 7W blue diode window get all messed up from dust after swapping lenses, and I absolutely am not letting that happen on this irreplaceable diode. To those worried about back-reflections, I ordered AR coated glass from edmund optics, put a bead of glue down and cured it, then glued the lens to the front to have it slightly off-set.
Here's a few more pics to end off the post. More can be found in the album here:
