Any 445 accidents yet?

[LSRFAQ]

Water absorbs IR. from what i understand, eye tissue will absorb the IR and damage will occur on the surface and through tot he lens of the eye and not make it into the internal structure including the retina. From what i have read, to a point there will be no pain as your lens, cornea and perhaps iris are damaged but soon after there will be pain or at least discomfort, plus e deterioration of your sight as this happens. Ive read this in a few differrent places including I believe, sam's laser faq.

1.1 microns (1100 nm) and down hits the retina, 1.2-1.4u its a toss up, the energy splits between the cornea and retina. 1.4u and longer is adsorbed by the cornea, and you start seeing terms like "eye safe" rangefinders, eye safe meaning "I hope you like your new plastic replacement cornea and lens" Yes the cornea can withstand vast amounts of power, but it does burn/ablate like everything else biological, or laser corneal sculpting (Lasik) would not work.

Eye safe IR laser means, "the cornea can take quite a hit", but its still not 100% safe.

Steve

 

[electros]

Not gonna lie, I gave myself 10 or so floaters by looking at the dot on a white wall for a few seconds. All these people saying dot viewing is safe are wrong... I've been to the doctor and theres no retinal damage.

But I'm honestly not sure which is worse, as retinal damage you just subconsciously ignore after time, wheras floaters since they move around tend to be a constant nuisance since the brain can't learn to ignore them.

in a few situations, such as reading on a white computer monitor, or looking at the sky they get annoying, but otherwise they aren't really that bad.

I would seriously advise you do not look at the dot without goggles, period. It's not like your eyes are any more resistant than mine.

 

[Aseras]

Most of you are apparently fools, half blind already or just plain lucky. It take nothing to burn your eye.

How about this example ( saw it today ) The Body Odd - Teen's 'laser show' prank zaps eyeballs

Once you get over 400mw the dot itself is capable of burning your retina after viewing ( since most of you sit there and probably stare at it).

I have burned several camera CCD's myself. it doesn't take much. The glare or dot viewing slowly diminishes your vision you do not SEE it. things just look dimmer. you mostly notice it at night.

A direct hit gives you a blind spot, but even then your body is very good at hiding it.

you all need to be WAY more careful.

 

[Eudaimonium]

Most of you are apparently fools, half blind already or just plain lucky. It take nothing to burn your eye.

How about this example ( saw it today ) The Body Odd - Teen's 'laser show' prank zaps eyeballs

Once you get over 400mw the dot itself is capable of burning your retina after viewing ( since most of you sit there and probably stare at it).

I have burned several camera CCD's myself. it doesn't take much. The glare or dot viewing slowly diminishes your vision you do not SEE it. things just look dimmer. you mostly notice it at night.

A direct hit gives you a blind spot, but even then your body is very good at hiding it.

you all need to be WAY more careful.

Yes we are all retarded fools with short therm memory loss every five seconds so we forget how laser dots look like so we stare at them for hours at the time with eyes wide open and jaw dropped.

Are you kidding me?!

 

[DrSid]

Peace gentlemen .. everybody has right to burn his own eyes out. Still it's more fun with good eyes, just my $0.02.

 

[Eudaimonium]

Peace gentlemen .. everybody has right to burn his own eyes out. Still it's more fun with good eyes, just my $0.02.

Well if he wants to, he deserves to.

Good point.

I just got very midly offended by the guy thinking we all stare at the dot on the wall. Yeah right.

 

[r8nd0m]

I don't think people are aware of the fluorescence hazard. Even if they have OD6 445nm goggles, if a powerful 445nm hits something and fluoresces to ~590nm the goggle's protection will be nearly non-existent.

 

[benmwv]

I think we will be safe from the flourescent hazard so long as we dont shine it at a highlighter tip


Math Fail:

Just My $0.2

:lasergun:

horrible divergence on that pen

 

[oic0]

Not gonna lie, I gave myself 10 or so floaters by looking at the dot on a white wall for a few seconds. All these people saying dot viewing is safe are wrong... I've been to the doctor and theres no retinal damage.

But I'm honestly not sure which is worse, as retinal damage you just subconsciously ignore after time, wheras floaters since they move around tend to be a constant nuisance since the brain can't learn to ignore them.

in a few situations, such as reading on a white computer monitor, or looking at the sky they get annoying, but otherwise they aren't really that bad.

I would seriously advise you do not look at the dot without goggles, period. It's not like your eyes are any more resistant than mine.

I dont think a laser can cause floaters as that is just crap floating around inside your eye. Everyone gets em as they age. Having a bad prescription makes them worse since they are more in focus for you. Mine drive me nuts since with -6.5/-7 they are in very good focus. If you sit still a while they will often settle somewhere. Your eyes will learn to somewhat ignore them too. Causes me some issues with a red dot gun sight, my eyes are so used to ignoring stray little anomolies It takes me a long time to find the dot unless its set to bright (which reduces accuracy). I have to use a holo sight with an actual reticle on my guns.

 

[Cheech]

I don't think people are aware of the fluorescence hazard. Even if they have OD6 445nm goggles, if a powerful 445nm hits something and fluoresces to ~590nm the goggle's protection will be nearly non-existent.

I have a 1/2 pound bag of glow in the dark powder. Sometimes when I'm feeling like playing with some lasers I take a nice bit of the stuff and throw it on tables,floors,plants. Then use my 445 at 600ma to draw with... I never thought about your quote before but it makes sense. What would those wavelengths even be?

 

[benmwv]

I have a 1/2 pound bag of glow in the dark powder. Sometimes when I'm feeling like playing with some lasers I take a nice bit of the stuff and throw it on tables,floors,plants. Then use my 445 at 600ma to draw with... I never thought about your quote before but it makes sense. What would those wavelengths even be?

That would entirely depend on what color it looks like when it hits the powder but probably it a yellow-green in the mid to high 500's

 

[r8nd0m]

I have a 1/2 pound bag of glow in the dark powder. Sometimes when I'm feeling like playing with some lasers I take a nice bit of the stuff and throw it on tables,floors,plants. Then use my 445 at 600ma to draw with... I never thought about your quote before but it makes sense. What would those wavelengths even be?

You can pretty much estimate it based on the color of the re-emitted light. The light I was thinking of was yellow or orange light (around 580nm-620nm); which seems to be rather common for fluorescence.

 

[Bluefan]

The fluorescence is by no means collimated, and definately lower in energy than the incoming beam, although some efficient fluorescence process may just provide huge amount of light when you put 1 watt in. You don't have to worry about a direct hit of the fluorescence, but do mind the huge amount light of very fluorescent sources.

 

[Asherz]

Whilst I agree with laser safety and all, and wearing goggles whilst burning or doing something else where the beam or dot is not required to be seen I agree with Eudaim, part of the fun of lasers is seeing the nice colour and the beam.

As long as it's for only short periods of time viewing a diffused reflection of a laser is fine as long as it's not ridiculously powerful, whilst 1W is a lot the amount of light entering your eye from a diffused reflection isn't going to cause any long term damage as long as your head isn't right next to it staring at it intensly.

I'm not recommending you do view it without goggles, but I sure as hell would find this hobby a lot more boring if I didn't. But if all these people preaching wear your goggles at all times do as they say, how do you know you've received a real 445nm?

I'm going to carry on enjoying my laser as I see fit.

 

[Bluefan]

A power meter and a spectrometer, that's how we know

I also take my goggles of every once and a while to admire the beam, but only when the laser is safety mounted somewhere, the dot either dumped in a beamdump or not that high power and the beampath free, far below eyelevel but parallel to the ground. That's why pointer are particularly dangerous, they easily point another way. Anything moving in the beam or any moving beam is a risk, so I nearly always have my goggles on.

 

[FarewellToKings]

I would like to see an experiment where someone takes a powerful laser of their choice, shines it on a white surface, and then uses a magnifying glass to focus the image of the dot on that surface onto a laser power meter to see if anything significant registers. Even if it did register, this would be far more energy than would be collected by the eye.

Plus, just think about the energy thresholds for retinal damage. Isnt something like >5mw entering a 7mm retina considered the dividing line between safe and dangerous? Even if the surface reflects 100% of the 1w in a diffuse pattern over 180 degrees in every direction, your pupil represents such a tiny percentage of total area at even 6 or 8 feet, that I find it really hard to believe that it absorbs enough energy to be acutely damaged, although the dangers of prolonged intense blue light should not be ignored.

Have you ever been hit in the eye with a <5mw laser? Not considered particularly dangerous, but still astoundingly bright. Orders of magnitude brighter than anything I have ever seen reflected from a wall. The only thing that has ever come close to looking like that is burning a white newspaper with my new 400mw blue Spartan. In this case, the beam was focused to a tiny point, and my goggles slipped down. It is definitely not something I would ever look at intentionally. Because I was only 8 or so inches away, I could see that being extremely dangerous.

These stories about getting floaters from looking at a laser dot from across the room, or not wanting to use your laser in any condition without goggles for fear of a bug flying into the beam 10 feet away seems to indicate a lot of ignorance when it comes to lasers. Safety is very important, but you need to have some common sense about it, or else you are not going to enjoy this hobby.