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I have some Aixiz 50mW green labbies that all have divergence values below 1mrad. I also have a CNI 100mW green labby, a NewStar Lasers 150mW labby and an o-like 100mW labby that all have divergence values in excess of 1.5 mrad.. It seems like the higher the power, the worse the divergence. I believe this is due in part to the fact that they are all "microchip" lasers that use DPM crystal sets. These crystal sets have cavities that are 2-3mm long at best. Also, the optical arrangement of many Chinese lasers may not be 100% optimal. I generally don't complain about it because I use most of my labbies in scanners and the slightly higher divergence makes crowd scanning safer while at the same time preserving the razor thin laser beam look.. As long as the divergence is less than 2 mrad, I'm fine with it.
I'm not an optics expert, and things like focal length and lens selection give me a headache. I do know that sometimes, even if you use a collimating lens and focus the beam as well as possible, the beam can only be collimated so far. As an example, I attempted to refocus my NewStar Lasers 150mW to reduce the divergence, but no matter how much I adjusted, I could not achieve a divergence less than 1.8mrad. I'm not 100% sure why that is, but I'm hoping someone else out there does and can explain it for us.
I'm not an optics expert, and things like focal length and lens selection give me a headache. I do know that sometimes, even if you use a collimating lens and focus the beam as well as possible, the beam can only be collimated so far. As an example, I attempted to refocus my NewStar Lasers 150mW to reduce the divergence, but no matter how much I adjusted, I could not achieve a divergence less than 1.8mrad. I'm not 100% sure why that is, but I'm hoping someone else out there does and can explain it for us.
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