mhakali
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Price Angels focusable 200mW 532nm review [SKU 73960]
This review is of PriceAngel's laser located here. This review may contain unsuitable contents for laser lovers such as dessication, gore and bare metal nudity. Parental guidance is strongly advised. :angel:
Problems loading images? Gimme a shout.
First off...
... big Thank You to John from PA for arranging a fast shipment for these items! He has provided exceptional customer support, and is in my opinion on the right track towards making a good business name for himself here at LPF! :thanks:
One more review is to follow after this one. Package contained two lasers.
Very quickly after receiving these items I gave John a preliminary power output estimate for the items. We have had a good discussion about how PA can improve and have a better quality assurance. As a quick response, John posted a thread in advance apologizing to customers whom has not yet received their lasers.
Thank you for the big honesty! :wave: Many other companies would have turned a blind eye. (Read YoTang, FocalPrice and even DealExtreme :spank.
Shipping!
Package was delivered by EMS. Delivery time once shipped from China was 4 days including customs clearing. No import taxes / duties was applied thanks to swift declaration persuasion
And then came a package!
Thank you for delivering in a box and not in those bubble plastic bags! :beer:
Very well packaged.
Inside resided two pretty boxes with the lasers!
Both boxes were unharmed. Well packaging. Excellent delivery time.
Laser in box:
So, what about the laser?
The specs of this laser was:
Accessories accompanying was a 18650 battery and keys to the tailcap. No charger. Picture of body in whole:
Closeup on head:
The head is interesting. The top of the head is a shutter which by turning closes the aperture of the head. The focus lens adjustment is located about 2cm (~0.8in) in on the head as a turnable section just like the outer shutter control.
The focus is smooth and feels oiled! It's easy to adjust it to achieve the focus desired!
Tailcap up close:
And finally, the battery included:
Power measurement! Transverse mode?
First thing I would like to get off my chest so that I can continue this review is power output. As it was advertised as a <200mW laser many were skeptic. Unfortunately this laser does not perform it's full 200mW.
Measurements done over 5 minutes with an IR-filter, which will unavoidably reduce the green power output with a few percent. The laser pointer itself is not equipped with a built in IR filter -- As per advertised in the product information. Equipment used was a LaserBee Deluxe 1W.
As we can see it's not a close-to-200mW as some would hope. Taking it off the IR-filter makes it jump up to ~65mW. I would estimate a ~15mW loss of 808nm and 1064nm IR light, and 7-8mW loss in 532nm light due to the filtering.
This leaves it as a perfectly stable 50mW greenie. And yes, stable is the best word I can find for this laser! I have had it running for 10+ minutes without it even getting warm. At both start and end and at all times in between it keeps in a perfect TEM00!
Considering that Rayfoss sells this exact same host 50mW version at $45 excluding shipping, I don't feel that I have done a bad deal of this!
And a quote from our friend at another thread:
Expanded beam dot:
Some visible circular artifacts. This is most likely due to the colamination lens used, which seems to be some kind of plastic. The dot in the picture above looks a bit oval due to angle which I took the photo from.
I have never seen it go out of TEM00.
Otherwise the beam / dot is *VERY* clean. I have not seen as clean dot on a cheap greenie as this one. Or well. I lied, perhaps once. But it is rare! Usually some of the lenses are dirty or has terrible quality making splashes around the dot.
Divergence wise it could have done a bit better. Measured it to perform around 2MRad. It is not terrible.
I would have preferred to see it below 1.5. This is with the focus set to infinity, and tried to tweak it by finding a magic spot right before min zoom which in some lasers can result in a tiny bit better divergence.
Gimme beamshots!
Sure, you've got it
Yes. The blue LED is Very bright. And it is Very annoying! Solved it in the final version by removing it all together from the host In the meantime I settled with covering it with a piece of paper.
Doing another go gives:
Close up on the head:
And one distanced:
I'm sorry for the mess. The metal chunk you see below the laser is a 5U UPS rack mountable unit.
As I mentioned the blue LED power indicator was uncomfortably bright. I decided to do a quick power measurement in the LaserBee of the LED facing the sensor. I didn't think it would react. But I got a whopping result!
11mW! -- This light is really blinding, ey!
Now I know that the measure distance should be around 20cm, but for a LED spreading out the light it was impossible to get a reading. Some of you may say that the termophile might have picked up on the body heat, so I turned the body around a quickie:
But enough about that.
Where is the bare metal gore nudity then?
I decided to take a chance and dissect this laser down to it's building blocks. I have successfully dismounted it, removed the blue LED, and reassembled it. It still works, however, I accidentally lost the colamination lens. It was glued in place. Which I thought was holding the entire head in place.
Starting from the beginning.
Removing the focus head section gives an exposed glue-attached colamination lens exposed. It comes off without any struggle.
The detached head as shown from behind:
Now the entire colamination lens set which forces the actual laser module down in to place is held down by the aluminum heatsink you can see around the colamination lens head.
Removing it is a matter of inserting an object into the two holes on the sides, and turning. It will remove without problems, giving you the following parts.
The assembly pressed down against the actual module looks like:
Removing it all together allows you to extract the laser module and crystal assembly, attached to the driver. You can see two soldered cables leading in to the LED diode.
Zoomed in on the crystal assembly set in front of the 808nm IR laser diode:
Close up picture of the driver bottom side:
Close up picture of the driver top side:
And ready to be put together again:
Summary
It has been a pleasure reviewing this unit. Even though most of us were probably hoping for a bit higher power output, this laser comes with surprising other qualitative properties:
If I get to choose between a high power output and a clean beam and steady transverse mode I would probably choose the laser with the better beam specifications.
For the negative points:
Comments? Suggestions? Etc?
Over all, PA, and John -- :gj:
Looking forward to you receiving your LPM and putting your manufacturers to the wall! Think you can do very good here with your products!
This review is of PriceAngel's laser located here. This review may contain unsuitable contents for laser lovers such as dessication, gore and bare metal nudity. Parental guidance is strongly advised. :angel:
Problems loading images? Gimme a shout.
First off...
... big Thank You to John from PA for arranging a fast shipment for these items! He has provided exceptional customer support, and is in my opinion on the right track towards making a good business name for himself here at LPF! :thanks:
One more review is to follow after this one. Package contained two lasers.
Very quickly after receiving these items I gave John a preliminary power output estimate for the items. We have had a good discussion about how PA can improve and have a better quality assurance. As a quick response, John posted a thread in advance apologizing to customers whom has not yet received their lasers.
Thank you for the big honesty! :wave: Many other companies would have turned a blind eye. (Read YoTang, FocalPrice and even DealExtreme :spank
.Shipping!
Package was delivered by EMS. Delivery time once shipped from China was 4 days including customs clearing. No import taxes / duties was applied thanks to swift declaration persuasion
And then came a package!
Thank you for delivering in a box and not in those bubble plastic bags! :beer:
Very well packaged.
Inside resided two pretty boxes with the lasers!
Both boxes were unharmed. Well packaging. Excellent delivery time.
Laser in box:
So, what about the laser?
The specs of this laser was:
- Wavelength: 532nm +- 10nm, DPSS green
- IR filtered: No -- Going raw
- Body color: Pitch Black! Looks pretty
- Body material: Most likely (tm) aluminum
- Cooling: Passive / heatsink
- Power rating: <200mW :shhh:
- Focusable: Yes!
- Burning power: Moderate
- Price: $46.32 incl shipping. Less if you ask John for coupons.
Accessories accompanying was a 18650 battery and keys to the tailcap. No charger. Picture of body in whole:
Closeup on head:
The head is interesting. The top of the head is a shutter which by turning closes the aperture of the head. The focus lens adjustment is located about 2cm (~0.8in) in on the head as a turnable section just like the outer shutter control.
The focus is smooth and feels oiled! It's easy to adjust it to achieve the focus desired!
Tailcap up close:
And finally, the battery included:
Power measurement! Transverse mode?
First thing I would like to get off my chest so that I can continue this review is power output. As it was advertised as a <200mW laser many were skeptic. Unfortunately this laser does not perform it's full 200mW.
Measurements done over 5 minutes with an IR-filter, which will unavoidably reduce the green power output with a few percent. The laser pointer itself is not equipped with a built in IR filter -- As per advertised in the product information. Equipment used was a LaserBee Deluxe 1W.
As we can see it's not a close-to-200mW as some would hope. Taking it off the IR-filter makes it jump up to ~65mW. I would estimate a ~15mW loss of 808nm and 1064nm IR light, and 7-8mW loss in 532nm light due to the filtering.
This leaves it as a perfectly stable 50mW greenie. And yes, stable is the best word I can find for this laser! I have had it running for 10+ minutes without it even getting warm. At both start and end and at all times in between it keeps in a perfect TEM00!
Considering that Rayfoss sells this exact same host 50mW version at $45 excluding shipping, I don't feel that I have done a bad deal of this!
And a quote from our friend at another thread:
Tech_Junkie said:
Expanded beam dot:
Some visible circular artifacts. This is most likely due to the colamination lens used, which seems to be some kind of plastic. The dot in the picture above looks a bit oval due to angle which I took the photo from.
I have never seen it go out of TEM00.
Otherwise the beam / dot is *VERY* clean. I have not seen as clean dot on a cheap greenie as this one. Or well. I lied, perhaps once. But it is rare! Usually some of the lenses are dirty or has terrible quality making splashes around the dot.
Divergence wise it could have done a bit better. Measured it to perform around 2MRad. It is not terrible.
I would have preferred to see it below 1.5. This is with the focus set to infinity, and tried to tweak it by finding a magic spot right before min zoom which in some lasers can result in a tiny bit better divergence.
Gimme beamshots!
Sure, you've got it
Yes. The blue LED is Very bright. And it is Very annoying! Solved it in the final version by removing it all together from the host
In the meantime I settled with covering it with a piece of paper.Doing another go gives:
Close up on the head:
And one distanced:
I'm sorry for the mess. The metal chunk you see below the laser is a 5U UPS rack mountable unit.
As I mentioned the blue LED power indicator was uncomfortably bright. I decided to do a quick power measurement in the LaserBee of the LED facing the sensor. I didn't think it would react. But I got a whopping result!
11mW! -- This light is really blinding, ey!
Now I know that the measure distance should be around 20cm, but for a LED spreading out the light it was impossible to get a reading. Some of you may say that the termophile might have picked up on the body heat, so I turned the body around a quickie:
But enough about that.
Where is the bare metal gore nudity then?
I decided to take a chance and dissect this laser down to it's building blocks. I have successfully dismounted it, removed the blue LED, and reassembled it. It still works, however, I accidentally lost the colamination lens. It was glued in place. Which I thought was holding the entire head in place.
Starting from the beginning.
Removing the focus head section gives an exposed glue-attached colamination lens exposed. It comes off without any struggle.
The detached head as shown from behind:
Now the entire colamination lens set which forces the actual laser module down in to place is held down by the aluminum heatsink you can see around the colamination lens head.
Removing it is a matter of inserting an object into the two holes on the sides, and turning. It will remove without problems, giving you the following parts.
The assembly pressed down against the actual module looks like:
Removing it all together allows you to extract the laser module and crystal assembly, attached to the driver. You can see two soldered cables leading in to the LED diode.
Zoomed in on the crystal assembly set in front of the 808nm IR laser diode:
Close up picture of the driver bottom side:
Close up picture of the driver top side:
And ready to be put together again:
Summary
It has been a pleasure reviewing this unit. Even though most of us were probably hoping for a bit higher power output, this laser comes with surprising other qualitative properties:
- Virtually unlimited duty cycle time! The battery will probably drain faster sooner than this thing loosing output due to overheating
- STABLE power output! It shifts with +- 3mW under a duty of 5 minutes!
- Perfect TEM00
- Extremely low heat dispense
- Fair, but not great divergence (about 2MRad)
- Excellent feel of the host! Great and smooth focus!
- Clean beam.
- Excellent customer service of Price Angels!
If I get to choose between a high power output and a clean beam and steady transverse mode I would probably choose the laser with the better beam specifications.
For the negative points:
- Obviously: Severely lower power output than rated
- Annoying blue LED
- Some artifacts in beam output visible when expanded
Comments? Suggestions? Etc?
Over all, PA, and John -- :gj:
Looking forward to you receiving your LPM and putting your manufacturers to the wall! Think you can do very good here with your products!
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