Re: PERMANENT THREAD: Ebay& other internet FINDS of interest- read all the OP please
Posting this for those who might be mislead by your statement about the 301, when focused at infinity you can probably put a dark mark on thermal paper, but on normal white paper, not. You did qualify your statement with the words "when focused" which to me must mean when adjusted out of infinity into a very small point. Perhaps then it
might be able to burn something very thin such as dark paper if you have the right optics (which I doubt one of these cheap pointers have), but even if it can focus to a close in point, at best I believe it can only weakly heat something if at their common 50mw outputs. Maybe if you got ahold of one of the few which can do 100mw or more and were able to focus that to a fine point you could produce some amount of smoke on some materials, but if you order ten of those you might get two which have close to 100mw output, if that many, possibly ten which are at 50-60mw.
The good news about the cheap 532nm China lasers (when working) is that milliwatt for milliwatt, in comparison, 532nm green always wins the brilliance contest, but the cheap China greenies such as the 301's aren't considered burners, for that get a 405-450nm blue, or 638nm red from 700mw to a watt or more, but those don't appear nearly as bright at the same powers compared to green. For high power, infrared is a less expensive way to go compared to red, green, or blue. However, you can't see anything of the beam and that can be dangerous due to having zero blink response to that wavelength, you can blind yourself in a flash without the flash, except for what happens when you fry the cells in the back of your eye that is, I've read there can be a momentary flash from that but it will be the last one you see with those cells.
As a random example of a 301 532nm greenie:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Green-301-M...Focus-Laser-Pointer-Pen-Charger-/321889268077
I expect there will come a day ebay policy will prohibit the sale of even "5mw" lasers on ebay (which are usually 50mw or higher) with as many issues are happening with dildo heads pointing at aircraft, so buy them now while they are cheap, but don't look at that model as a burner, regardless of what the seller says. If interested in 405nm, a 600-900mw output Blu-ray diode will burn things 20 feet away, if focused on it well into a tiny point, but don't expect big puffs of smoke and then fire, it burns in a very tiny point and IF the material can combust, it might catch on fire after awhile, maybe. If you want something like that, you will probably have to build it yourself, or have someone help you using one of these; BDR 209 405nm Blu-ray diode:
www.ebay.com/itm/900mW-405nm-BDR-20...e-W-Boost-Driver-G-2-Glass-Lens-/171016400234
From my point of view, except for its beautiful blue-violet color the beam, even 900nw of 405nm is unimpressive in the dark and the spot it produces weak to the eye because our eyes are only able to see 1 percent the brilliance of this wavelength compared to 532nm green, so in that way its real power can be deceiving, but it will burn in a tiny spot like a mad hornet on a rampage, so don't let it hit you or anyone else. Might be better to go with a 445-450nm blue if you want to see the beam, but that wavelength is only ten percent as bright to the eye as green and cannot focus to as fine a burning point as easy as the thin beam from a single mode 405nm diode can. For burning, you can buy a far more powerful blue or red laser much cheaper than a green laser, but the beam won't be nearly as bright appearing.
As a point of interest, the output from the BDR 209 Blu-ray diode is the highest power single mode diode I've been able to find at
any wavelength. As a single mode diode with an uber small emitter it produces a beam with much less spreading compared to other laser diodes, that is, for a given lens or output beam diameter at 900mw of output power, if you want to drive it that hard. Aside from its low divergence using a relatively small collimation lens, another nice aspect of this diode is that it can be focused to such a tiny spot to increase its power density so much it can quickly burn holes through thin wood, paper, plastic etc.
If you want a relatively inexpensive blue burner at 5 watts of output power, perhaps higher, get a host built using the NUBM44 diode. This diode burns very well and due to so much power has a reasonably bright beam at night, but unfortunately is a multimode diode and because of this diverges fairly rapidly, meaning the beam spreads relatively quickly compared to a 532nm laser pointer. Well for that matter, the NUBM44 (when used with a regular 6mm diameter lens most pointers use) will spread faster than most direct to wavelength laser diodes, except perhaps IR which can spread even faster, usually having higher divergence than visible lasers unless single mode infrared and then you are back to low power for those.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/6W-NUBM44-4...r-Module-W-Leads-G-2-Glass-Lens-/171841770497
These 638nm Oclaro red laser diodes can put out between 700-900+ mw if pushed hard enough and do a decent job of burning small stuff close up, but it also has the wide diverging output beam all multimode laser diodes suffer from (the NUBM44 the worst of the blues) and because of this in just a few feet you see a rectangle, or a bright line instead of a spot like a 532nm green pointer or 405nm single mode Blu-ray diode produces.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Oclaro-HL63...r-Module-W-Leads-G-2-Glass-Lens-/171494716164
NOTE: When I write one diode has more or less divergence than another, it's always relative to a given lens diameter, because if you use a larger diameter lens which produces a fatter collimated beam, you will get reduced divergence, but at the cost of using larger lenses to reduce the amount of beam spreading to an acceptable amount. For myself, I call an acceptable amount of divergence for a pointer to be from 1.2 to 1.5 mRad, less is wonderful, more bad... But that's just me, what I like to see.
