Hey Ablaze,
For the record - I'm not trying to shoot down your hopes for a new wavelength! I've done lots of crazy stuff in hopes of finding new diodes and new wavelengths. I ordered a 10 pound DVD writer from the late 90s, hoping to find a powerful 635 in it. I tore apart a pico projector to find a (slightly) higher wavelength blue. I'm ALL for new diode hunts. In fact, I was the first to alert the forum to the cheap Mitsubishi 635s, but I failed miserably because my initial stance was that "they were probably not real"
So my track record is not perfect as far as new diode sources go, but here's what I can tell you for certain:
- This company
IS NOT making their diode from scratch. Unless the company you're dealing with is Nichia, OSRAM, or Opnext, they're not building their own diodes. Designing a new diode is a hugely resource intensive process done at a very high levels of specialization. Even CNI doesn't build their own diodes. This isn't a guess, this is a
guarantee. They're not designing their own diodes. You may be confused about the difference between a "diode" and a "module". They could be (and probably are) making their own modules, but the diodes (which determine wavelength) are absolutely positively coming from someone else. Period.
Who is your Chinese supplier?
- If you can't say, or if they aren't a known business, or if they're swearing you to secrecy over just a few thousand dollars worth of sale, then they're not one of the handful of companies with the scale and resources to actually produce blue diodes.
I also don't think it's a scam, I think it's a mistake. We see these mistakes all the time. Truly. Here, we pay a lot of attention to the difference between 440nm and 450nm. But out in the world of laser sales, that distinction is often lost in the shuffle. We see 405s sold as 445s, and vice versa, ALL the time. In fact, we often see BLUE lasers described as 532nm, or 405nm lasers sold with IR filters. People make wavelength mistakes constantly.
