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Well, I caught this at the intermediate stage and got a stripped down version so it'd be easy to mail, so there's no pictures (no idea what the finished product looks like). Long story short though, Kenom is getting ready to offer a pretty exciting thermal meter based off of a real Coherent thermal head. I was interested in seeing how accurate it was so I begged and begged and finally got an evaluation unit.
I do have my gripes. It doesn't zero out on its own so you have to do a little basic arithmetic in your head. That minor frustration aside, I compared it to my calibrated Coherent Fieldmax II TO w/ PM3 sensor and was very impressed with the results. Of course the figures don't match up mW per mW, but there's a margin of error on everything from my power meter, to the laser sources. Overall though, they matched up pretty damn well - I daresay this Kenom meter is at least +/- 10% accuracy across 400-800nm, if not better. Comparisons were done with the following diode-based lasers instead of common DPSS sources like 532nm in the name of stability and to cover a decent spread of wavelengths:
- 405nm ~10mW DIY blu-ray laser
- Self-made TEC cooled 675nm fiber coupled >400mW laser
- >450mW 808nm pen laser
It matched up very well at 675nm and did well with 405nm. 808nm was the biggest difference, but even then we were only talking about 10-30mW or so on a 450mW unit.
Perhaps these tolerances aren't quite the stuff of your >$2k thermal meter, but considering Ken is going to be asking roughly a tenth of that, its one hell of a deal IMO. He's still working out the details as far as I know though, so I'll leave it to him to post the full features of this meter. All I know is that confronted with this or the LPM, I daresay I'd put a lot more faith in the thermal sensor of this Kenom meter. If you're on the market for a laser power meter, this is something to get excited about!
I do have my gripes. It doesn't zero out on its own so you have to do a little basic arithmetic in your head. That minor frustration aside, I compared it to my calibrated Coherent Fieldmax II TO w/ PM3 sensor and was very impressed with the results. Of course the figures don't match up mW per mW, but there's a margin of error on everything from my power meter, to the laser sources. Overall though, they matched up pretty damn well - I daresay this Kenom meter is at least +/- 10% accuracy across 400-800nm, if not better. Comparisons were done with the following diode-based lasers instead of common DPSS sources like 532nm in the name of stability and to cover a decent spread of wavelengths:
- 405nm ~10mW DIY blu-ray laser
- Self-made TEC cooled 675nm fiber coupled >400mW laser
- >450mW 808nm pen laser
It matched up very well at 675nm and did well with 405nm. 808nm was the biggest difference, but even then we were only talking about 10-30mW or so on a 450mW unit.
Perhaps these tolerances aren't quite the stuff of your >$2k thermal meter, but considering Ken is going to be asking roughly a tenth of that, its one hell of a deal IMO. He's still working out the details as far as I know though, so I'll leave it to him to post the full features of this meter. All I know is that confronted with this or the LPM, I daresay I'd put a lot more faith in the thermal sensor of this Kenom meter. If you're on the market for a laser power meter, this is something to get excited about!