Help buying

[Mattster97]

I'm obviously new to lasers and I hate to be THAT guy, but I'm looking for a fairly powerful laser for around 40$. I've put some hours into research and a color other than red is preferable honestly. I know about safety and I think could build one if I had clear instructions and the pieces.

*hopefully I didn't put this in the wrong place or broke any rules on my first post*

 

[Lethere Belight]

http://laserpointerforums.com/f51/i-want-build-laser-thread-52972.html

 

[Mattster97]

I wasn't really asking how, but more like what to get. I'm clueless on where to get anything good and what's worth the money.

 

[ZRaffleticket]

There's tons of threads out there just like this, with answers.

First off, are you completely new to lasers? If you are, don't shoot for things like a 1W blue quite yet, learn the safety through lower powers then get there.

If you're new to them, want to spend a quarter of what you can, just buy a "1mW" 405nm blu-ray/violet laser from feebay, you should get a decent 60+mW out of it.
After that get a 250mW 650nm red, followed by 100mW green then the 1W blues should be more reasonable to buy. I wouldn't recommend getting the green lasers from the beach or feebay because they're spitting out much more light than you can physically see.

Good places to buy from are usually lazerer, o-like, dragonlasers, jetlasers, laserglow, CNI, and lasever.

Anyway enough of my garbled mess. If that's not clear I'm sure somebody else will throw their $.02 in

 

[Mattster97]

Thanks! Yeah, 1W was shooting pretty high I figured. I couldn't find the 405nm you were talking about. Another thing was that I couldn't understand the CNI site. There seemed to be no place to buy. I did find these that seemed like a decent deal:
http://http://lazerer.com/Violet%20_Laser_Pointer?product_id=91
For its power to money ratio
http://http://www.o-like.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2&products_id=38
For its cool effects and the diffraction heads